By Jon Rieker
On average, “The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue due to piracy,” according to Nathan Lee of The New York Times. At first glance, one might think, “So what. It doesn’t affect me at all, and they make plenty of money anyway.” But, in fact, there are quite a few ways that the effects of movie piracy are felt by everyday citizens. When movie companies lose up to $3 billion, they feel a certain obvious need to make up for it somehow. This is the part that affects every consumer in America. A trip to the movie theater that used to cost about $5-10$ can cost the consumer about $10-$20 per person, depending on the time of day and the amount of snacks purchased. A DVD which might cost as little as 25 cents to actually produce is jacked up to an outrageous $22.99 to cover the loss caused by so many pirated copies being sold. So in fact it is the public’s money that is being taken by movie pirates. Furthermore, for those individuals in the field of communications who will be interested in finding a job having to do with the movie industry upon graduation, fewer jobs will be available. As with any other company, when business begins to suffer, generally the first individuals to feel it are the workers. With more layoffs combined with recent graduates in the field, competition is extremely tough for decent, well paying jobs.
It occurs to this writer that the primary cause of this whole problem is human greed. It is a matter of movie studios wanting to make more money vs. consumers trying to save more money. Studios raise prices and more consumers turn to movie piracy to avoid spending all of their hard-earned money. The studios lose more money to piracy and raise their prices again, and even more consumers are affected by the high prices and turn to the cheaper alternative. Recent advances in technology can even be attributed to this need to make more money. The DVD format is extremely easy for movie pirates to copy nowadays and the quality of copied material continues to increase. Now companies are releasing high-definition formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray. These formats are harder to copy because of the shear amount of information stored on the discs plus the high-def format is preferable to many consumers over the lower-quality DVD format or very low-quality pirated materials. Consumers who can afford this luxury invest in high-def systems and movies and the level of technology needed to use these systems increases. The question now is, How long will it be until the movie pirates answer back and find a cheap way to illegally reproduce these formats and studios start losing money again?
Both the legal and illegal methods of movie watching do have their pros and cons, though. In almost all cases, pirated movies have low-quality video, horrible audio, and a lot of times they have people walking by or at least coughing in the background. So why would anyone spend their hard-earned money on a product like that? One reason could be because they are usually available, depending on one’s location, during a film’s opening week in the theaters. In most consumers’ minds it’s a coin toss whether to go to the movie theater and spend a fortune to see a high quality movie once, or spend half as much for a low-quality copy of the same movie that can viewed many times. On the other hand, while watching a movie in a theater or owning a high-def system costs a lot more, most theaters and home entertainment systems have excellent sound systems and picture quality, and it is pretty much guaranteed that the audience gets to view the movie the way it was meant to be seen.
The fact is that movie piracy is against the law, and merely buying a pirated copy of a movie is a federal offense punishable by fines and/or jail time. While the punishments are quite severe for this form of copyright infringement, the actual regulation of these crimes is almost unheard of when it comes to common consumers. The FBI is always on the lookout for what one might call a big player in the movie piracy business, but it is very rare for an everyday citizen to get in trouble over buying a bootlegged movie. Siva Vaidhyanathan, from “Copyright Jungle,” Columbia Journalism Review, and reprinted in Taking Sides, Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society, states, “that the responsibility for policing copyrighted works is cumbersome, expensive, time consuming, and ultimately unworkable; therefore, she suggests that copyright is no longer a viable law, in its present state.”
Every consumer must make his own decision with regards to his stance on movie piracy. Maybe this article can help readers make an educated, informed decision after weighing the benefits and consequences instead of making a quick, irrational decision based solely on greed.
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