Saving Hollywood
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Saving Hollywood
Even with Pirate Bay convicted, the studios need to figure out a digital strategy.
Posted Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - 4:20pm
Last month, four men who run the Pirate Bay, perhaps the largest movie-piracy Web site on the planet, were convicted in a Swedish court of promoting copyright infringement and sentenced to a year in prison apiece. These men were true believers, high-concept pranksters, and sworn enemies of the movie industry. Dubbing the proceedings a "spectrial," (an amalgam of trial and spectacle), they and their supporters drove a bus around Europe, rallying people to their side. Friends of the cause protested outside the courthouse, where the bus was parked and served as their public relations headquarters. The Pirate Bay operators reportedly tried to buy Sealand, a defunct oil rig in the North Sea, in order to escape national copyright laws. After the conviction, some 25,000 Swedes joined the Pirate Party, a political party affiliated with Pirate Bay and dedicated to the "reform" of copyright laws.
Some people, like Columbia law professor Tim Wu, are tempted to think that even though Pirate Bay is still functioning, the conviction proves that as a business model, movie piracy is dead in the water. Last year's box-office figures went through the roof, and when your biggest foe is a motley collection of coders and performance artists, it's hard to imagine that Hollywood is expiring anytime soon. "There's a difference between a life and death, existential threat and an irritation," Wu says. "An elephant might complain a lot about mosquitoes, but is that elephant in any danger of dying?"
Maybe not. But DVD sales and rentals—by far Hollywood's most important revenue source these days—peaked in 2006 and have dropped by $2.5 billion, or one-quarter of the total annual box-office take, ever since. According to Eric Garland, who monitors music and movie piracy at bigchampagne.com, more than 70 million movies were downloaded via those irritants at Pirate Bay every week—and Pirate Bay is just one of countless piracy sites on the Web. Almost one in five Internet-connected computers around the world has downloaded BitTorrent software. If anything, Pirate Bay proves that people who spend their lives ripping movies aren't in it for the money—and that even if you put them in jail, someone will always be right behind them.
Thanks to the bandwidth required to share movies and the rise of the DVD in the late 1990s, Hollywood was spared a few years before piracy reached its glitzy shores, and studio moguls were able to learn from the music industry's clumsy response to file-sharing technology. But that doesn't mean they've figured it out. Piracy grows bigger every day, and movie studios and television networks are scrambling to find a way to save their industry. Do you lace more and better encryption into your DVDs and Blu-Rays? Offer your own movies and TV shows online for a small subscription or a few commercials to sit through? Sue the bastards?
Some studios, such as Fox and Universal, have opted for the hammer. Others, such as Warner and, improbably, Disney (DIS), have been moving toward making online entertainment as easy and convenient as possible. All of them have tried a mix of each, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. But with billions of dollars at stake, no one knows what will work. And according to Garland, they have only a few years before their window of opportunity closes and an entire generation grows up thinking free movies are simply their birthright.
"Young people are already being socialized to receive a hard drive full of first-run movies from the guy down the hall," Garland says. "In the very near future, most people will be watching what they want, when they want, on demand while they're sitting on the couch. The question for Hollywood is, do they want to be the people that offer that experience, or do they want to let someone else do it?"
Image of CD and lock by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
Comments
Big corps
I just can't trust big media corporations anymore.
You just can't. They are all moved by money and power.
They lie in order to get more money and more power.
Everything is corrupted.
This is our modern world.
A consumers view
The last movie I went to see in a theatre was "Matrix" -- where I had to deal with a crying baby, several cell phones, overpriced concessions, and a generally run-down environment. None of these is directly attributable to the studios, of course, but I'd wager they could exert some influence on correcting some of the problems. "License to view" is a movie theatre, where people go to watch and then go home; if the studios are going to offer to sell me something tangible to take home (DVD, VHS tape, whatever) for my "convenience", then don't turn around an INconvenience me by trying to dictate how/when/where I can use that media -- if they're going to sell it to me, then let me watch it so that it's convenient for ME: on my home DVD, my computer (a large widescreen monitor), a portable player, or anything else. And if the media isn't indestructable, then don't tell me that I can't make a backup copy of it -- not if they're going to charge the prices they do! For the life of me, I don't understand why the studios don't open their vaults and digitize *everything*, then offer a $20-gets-you-anything process. There are probably a couple hundred (older) movies that I'd buy at that price _if they were available_. It's a shiny, new digital world and the studios are going to have to accept the idea that they don't have the control they once did. They can either adapt, or go extinct.
Another Correction
You need some more corrections. The Pirate Party, be it in Sweden (piratpartiet) or elsewhere, is NOT affiliated with the Pirate Bay, and never has been. Perhaps you were thinking of Piratbyran, that started the Pirate Bay. They see themselves as a counter-organisation to antipiratbyran, which was one of the organisations behind the raids. As far as 'saving Hollywood' goes though, what it needs to be saved from, is itself. There are remakes of films, Us TV shows are basically now new versions of shows from other countries (Office, life on mars, The Shark Tank, American Idol, need I go on?) or derivitives (the 3 CSIs, the Law and Orders, etc). They are their own worst enemy, and believe that things can be solved by throwing money at them. Over the last 13 years, the budget of a top-10 box office film in the US has increased by 50%. the attendance has stayed the same. Common sense dictates that is a trend that will end badly. Then let's also talk about the losses the industry claims. In the 10 years I've been studying this, I've YET to see them produce ANY data to support their claims. If anything, the data they do put out contradicts their claims, as does history. Take a step back, in time this time, around 30 years. The VCR, the last technology that was going to destroy Hollywood and TV companies. Testifying to Congress, MPAA head Jack Valenti said "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Moment earlier he said "Mr. Chairman, this United States had a $5.3 billion trade deficit with Japan on electronic equipment alone. We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine." (source) Remember those claims? They're still being made today. Except it's not about VCRs, or trade deficits to Japan, just about economic losses, and job protection. Of course, as we know, it's not true. Did the industry bleed dry? No Were massive numbers of jobs lost? No 5-6 years after Jack Velanti's statement to congress, around 70% of Hollywood's income came from sources dervied from the technology. Let me remind you of another thing - The Supreme Court ruled VCRs as legal, despite accepting that less than 10% of a VCRs usage were not infringing. Napster had 4-5%. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is considerably more than 10%. The BBC uses it, big name artists like Nine Inch Nails uses it, tens of thousands of smaller musicians use it (via sites like Jamendo) game companies use it (for updates, demos etc). If anything, I'm pretty certain there are more musicians using Bittorrent, than the big4 have signed (and I'll bet those independants make as much, if not more than the majority of the big4's artists as well) VCRs are not the exceptio either. The same arguments were trotted out for Cable TV, radio and even Player Pianos. That they are still able to be trotted out, by these companies that should be dead four times over, shows they're blatently not true. What it comes down to at the end of the day, with organisations like DECE, is that they want to sell you multiple copies of the same thing. Ten years ago, If i bought a tape I could take it with me, watch it where I wanted. With a DVD I can only take it where I want in the same 'region' and play it (and as I am British, and my wife American, it means our DVD collections aren't compatable) So if my kids want to watch Cars in the Us, we need a US version, and in the UK we'd need a UK version. Previously, I could buy the VHS copy of a film in the US and play it in the UK as well. Now they want to restrict what you can play it on, and even prevent you from reselling what you've bought (violating first sale doctrine) because now you've not bought a copy any more, you've purchased a 'non-transferable license'. Goodbye second hand shops, used book stores, etc. where media gems could be found. Technology is designed to make man do more. 1,000 years ago, you couldn't go more than a hundred miles a day, you could farm a whole acre, OR create something, like a sword, or a plough. Cars mean a hundred miles is nothing, technology is an enabler. The only field where technology is being used to enable you to do LESS than before though, is this field. It clearly fights against progress and human nature. Would a technology that limited every person to a 10mile radius of their home, unless a person paid a company thousands and did a complex legal deal for increased movement rights, be accptable? No, it wouldn't, and yet such restrictions for the culture of our society is supposedly acceptable? Perhaps we should take the words of RIAA CEO Cary Sherman to heart: make some 'common sense reforms' to deal with this. Let's start by reducing copyright terms to match the intent. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" That's the foundation for both copyright and patents in the US. Not that Hollywood has much respect for that part of the US Constitution - Hollywood is where the movies are at, because the movie companies were trying to avoid paying patent royalties. Andrew Norton Coordinator Pirate Party International
Odd?
I don't find it odd at all that NBC and News Corp aggressively protect their media, despite owning Hulu. Doesn't the fact that they are competing in the same market as pirated media (free, available on-line) mean that there is even more incentive for them to protect their copyrights?
Boo
Shame, Chris, for not mentioning two things: 1) The judge on the Pirate Bay case was found later to be a member of two large Swedish intellectual property groups. 2) BitTorrent is used for much more than just piracy: see here this piece that was touting its legal uses way back in 2005: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/paulandrews/2002199172_paul07.html