Studios report record revenues
p2pnet.net News:- “Despite fears that internet piracy would dent its profits, Hollywood has had a buoyant year,” says the Guardian Unlimited.
For “buoyant” read almost forty-five billion dollars in revenues.
Nonetheless, the major movie studios flood world print and electronic media outlets with claims that they’re being ruined by file sharing and ’pirating’ and that “thousands” of support staff are enduring terrible hardships as a direct result.
File sharing means exactly that. Sharing. No money changes hands and no sales or rentals, or anything else, are affected by it.
‘Pirating,’ on the other hand, is PR-speak for the completely unrelated criminal duplication of the physical CDs and DVDs the movie and record label cartels produce in their billions and which does indeed rob them of sales and earnings.
However, in their attempts to gain total control of what happens online, the labels and studios try strenuously to link file sharing with counterfeiting, although the two have nothing to do with each other.
In the meanwhile, “Worldwide revenues from cinema tickets, videos and DVD sales, as well as television rights, reached a whopping $44.8bn (£24bn) last year, up 9% from 2003,” says the story, adding:
“Record DVD sales fuelled the increase, up 14% in the US and 46% worldwide, but most other sectors did better than last year. The only exception was cinema ticket sales outside America. These did fall, but by a relatively modest 1%.”
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See:-
Guardian Unlimited – Internet piracy fails to sink film profits, May 3, 2005
May 4th, 2005 at 6:29 pm
I agree. If someone shares a movie and likes it, it’s only good PR, word of mouth that the movie was good. I know a lot of people that share to “preview” the movie before possibly buying the DVD for their collection. It eliminates paying for a crappy movie that is falsly represented in advertisements as “two thumbs up”. There is no “warranty” issued for movies that are falsly repesented as “good”. Personally, I have around 190 DVD’s in my collection, most of them purchased used a month or so after they are released so the price has come way down.
You would not purchase a car before you drove it, even thought there are “lemon Laws” in most states. Well there is no protection of consumers money by the Entertainment Cartel.
The story hits the hammer on the head though about “piracy”. Reproducing for profit is just plain wrong. I was in Chinatown(NYC) a few years ago, and one store was selling movies for $5 each with photocopies of the jackets. they were not even attempting to hide this as there was aoround 60 VCR’s recording and one playing RIGHT ON THEIR SIDE WALL!!! Nothing was done to stop this. That is a HUGE difference from sharing to preview a movie.
May 4th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
Nuf said.