Movie studios sue ‘pirates’
p2pnet.net News:- The four members of the record label cartel claim file sharing is “devastating” the music business. Similarly, the seven major studios swear file sharing is helping to ruin the movie industry.
Both claims are ludicrous.
One music file shared doesn’t equal one CD sale lost any more than a low quality, low resolution movie file shared equals one less trip to the movies, one less rental or one less DVD buy.
The Big Seven studios have sicced their MPAA onto file sharers in the same way their bretheren, the members of the Big Four record label cartel, turned their RIAA loose on moms, pops and kids who share music online via the p2p networks.
The studios’ new mouthpiece, Dan Glickman, says the civil suits will demand ‘damages’ of up to $30,000 per film.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) goes for between $750 and $150,000 for a single downloaded mp3. However, not one of the 6,191 sued by the RIAA has been sentenced by a court because the RIAA always suggests victims settle in an amount it decides.
There’s no way on earth these very ordinary people can match Big Music’s legal or financial resources, so they invariably ’settle,’ making a mockery of the concept: innocent until proven guilty.
However, as far and the RIAA is concerned, that’s fine. The 6,000 are serving their purpose. They’ve been sued so they must have been found guilty of something. Right? And the ever-faithful mainstream media pick that thought up and run with it.
The fact the sue ‘em all campaign is failing miserably is beside the point.
And it’s a better than even bet the same thing will happen with MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) law suits.
Even more so than the record label cartel, the studios are raking the money in. Yet they’re flaunting a highly questionable ’study’ they organized and which was undertaken by OTX, a firm whose senior executives have close and ongoing ties to the movie business, as one of the reasons for launching their own RIAA-type legal war.
Yankee Group’s Mike Goodman said the MPAA was using incomplete reporting to “paint a picture that is far from reality“.
Glickman says the MPAA will file hundreds of lawsuits starting on November 16.
And for him, it’s not just business. It’s also personal.
Yesterday, USA Today ran an interesting Q&A with Glickman:
Q: [...] piracy has even negatively affected your family, correct?
A: My son Jon was executive producer of the recent film Mr. 3000. A few days after the film was released, a member of my staff found it being sold as a DVD just a few blocks from our offices. I called my son to give him the bad news, and he told me this is happening to all the current films. And then he said, ‘And what are you going to do about it, Dad?’
Here are a couple of other clips:
Q: At the time the RIAA announced its lawsuits, it said music sales had fallen 25% over a three-year period. The MPAA is in a much different situation. Box office receipts aren’t down at all – 2003’s figures were $9.5 billion, the second biggest in history. So how is the MPAA being hurt by online piracy?
A: We know there are losses. We believe we’re losing $3.5 billion yearly. Someone sneaks into a theater with a camcorder, films a movie, puts it online for the world to see for free, and it gets duplicated into DVDs that are getting sold on street corners from New York and Los Angeles to China. If this is allowed to continue, it will sink our industry.
Q: You’ve been on the job for two months, and before this you worked in Congress and the White House. How are you getting up to speed on technology and the Internet?
A: I have very good teachers here. I think of myself as having adequate knowledge, but the principles are easy to understand. We have to embrace new technologies, but also enforce the law.
There’s been a lot of press on the MPAA announcement but strangely, not one of the mainstream write-ups have mentioned that:
- The MPAA is still recovering from a recent debacle featuring Grind (Warner Bros) and Twisted (Paramount)
- It was caught red-handed trying to use a strictly American law to threaten people in other countries.
- It recently tried to use a spurious study to claim nearly a quarter of Net users have illegally downloaded a film
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See:-
6,191 sued – RIAA sues another 750, p2pnet, October 29, 2004
far from reality – MPAA file share travesty, p2pnet, July 13, 2004
Q&A – Movie swappers put on notice, USA Today, November 5, 2004
recent debacle – MPAA cock-up in Australia, p2pnet, September 21, 2004
red-handed – DMCA League of Nations, p2pnet, August 30, 2004
spurious study – MPAA’s shock horror study, p2pnet, July 9, 2004
November 7th, 2004 at 12:23 am
The real problem is the movie industry does not make movies available in divx or other compressed formats. People would buy 1st run movies (and other movies) the day they come out if they made them available online. In addition (best case) it takes 6-9 months after a movie comes out for it to be available on DVD to buy…and then one has to take that and create a divx file from it if you want to watch it when you travel or on your PC.
I don’t have time to go to movies anymore, so I wait for DVDs to come out…the folks on the street and on the Internet are filling a gap in movie demand that the movie industry does not serve today. Very simple, make content available online…
November 7th, 2004 at 2:19 am
i cant even down a movie from mp3downloadhq dont waste your time with this site
November 7th, 2004 at 4:32 am
movies are always better in the theater. So if it’s worth the price people will go to it. Dropping 12 bucks to see if it is a good movie or not is not wise. Like the any industry if you make a good product it will sell. Quit dumping on us north americans and have a look at Russia and other eastern countries where your real problems is.
November 7th, 2004 at 5:20 pm
My son Jon was executive producer of the recent film Mr. 3000…and he told me this is happening to all the current films. And then he said, ‘And what are you going to do about it, Dad?’
“Well, son in a monsterously misgiuded manner I am going to sue the very people who may watch your tripe and like it on filesharing networks and subsequently watch it in the theatre or recommend it to friends instead of focusing our efforts on the actual criminal counterfeiting groups overseas and here….b/c son, we all know that it was that college student in his dorm that pirated that movie, mass produced thousands of DVDs and is now distributing them coast to coast and has recruited street-level sellers, all in between classes and on weekends.
Good work dad your my hero!!!
TT
November 8th, 2004 at 2:02 am
i agree with you, it takes 5 to 6 month before the the movie on dvd….why????
November 8th, 2004 at 8:48 pm
“Dropping 12 bucks to see if it is a good movie or not is not wise.”
Totally agree with you there. Plus you can’t trust reviews anymore. I’ve seen many movies that have gotten good reviews by critics which I hated, and many that got poor reviews which I loved. Maybe I have bad taste, who knows? Of course there is always trailers, but that usually isn’t a very good indicator of quality either since they’re designed specifically to advertise a movie by making look it’s best. In fact, I’ve gone to movies in the past that were completely opposite of what the trailer made them out to be, which left me felt like I had been lied to. Of course, that kind of thing happend more before the internet became a part of daily life.
While I’m at it, I can’t understand why they’re making such a big stink over something that is always so low in quality. Sure, I’ll download an episode of a favorite TV show if the VCR timer was set wrong or the time slot changed without me knowing about it until it was too late, and I don’t really see the problem with that. Especially since I have no interest in keeping any movie or TV show I download since the quality is always so incredibly poor. In fact, I think pretty much every movie or series I’ve ever downloaded I’ve either gone to the theater to see or bought the DVD when it came out. I paid a lot of money for my home theater and love it to death, so I prefer buying DVD’s of good movies/shows when ever I can. The only conclusion I can come to is that either these execs are incredilbly stupid, or just incredibly misinformed. Probably a bit of both.