[Infowarrior] - What piracy crisis? MPAA touts record box office for 2007

[Richard Forno]

What piracy crisis? MPAA touts record box office for 2007

By Nate Anderson | Published: March 05, 2008 - 03:29PM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080305-for-movie-biz-tales-of-piracy-
and-record-profits.html

After learning how a bill becomes a law, your kids might also learn about
the wonders of copyright, thanks to the MPAA. The motion picture trade group
has signed an agreement with the popular Weekly Reader publication for kids
that will highlight "canine crime-fighting ambassadors Lucky and Flo."
That's right: DVD-sniffing dogs will educate children about the value of
copyrights in a "fun and exciting way." Sounds like a blast.

But this sort of thing has become crucial to the MPAA. Take a look at the
group's homepage; nearly everything is about copyrights and piracy. The MPAA
routinely asserts that the movie business is being decimated by piracy, but
the press release announcing the Weekly Reader deal sits just below a far
more interesting piece of news (PDF): data that shows the US box office
doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over
2006 and bringing in $9.63 billion.

Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to
target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It's
so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year
"lost" to Internet piracy. It's so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore
years of common carrier law and the promises of "safe harbor" and start
filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations.

The real world isn't quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the
MPAA's college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came
after years of hiding the study's methodology but continuing to lobby
Congress with its numbers. There's no possible way that the MPAA can truly
know what it "lost" to piracy, either, as it has no real idea what
percentage of downloads would have resulted in sales. And, with the notable
exception of AT&T, no other major US ISP has publicly entertained the idea
of filtering traffic.

Certainly the MPAA has the right to fight illegal downloads of its material,
and it certainly has the right to go after those making a profit by ripping
off its DVDs. But the rhetoric around "piracy" (a term used far too broadly)
simply doesn't fit with reality. If piracy is killing the movie business,
it's doing so in exactly the same way that home taping killed the music
business in the 1980s.

Swapping movies over the Internet was more of a niche practice back in 2001
as bandwidth constraints made it impractical for many. Certainly it's much
simpler now, and advanced P2P protocols like BitTorrent (combined with free
trackers like The Pirate Bay) make it relatively simple. But the movie
business did $9.63 billion at theaters alone in 2007, a substantial increase
over 2001's $8.13 billion. US box office has also risen for the last two
years, and international growth rates have been much higher and more
constant.

DVD piracy and file-swapping pose problems for the industry, no doubt about
it, but the entire issue deserves to have the rhetoric scaled back a bit. As
Dan Glickman, the MPAA boss, admitted, "Ultimately, we got our Hollywood
ending. Once again, diverse, quality films and the timeless allure of the
movie house proved a winning combination with consumers around the world."

So break out the champagne (for the MPAA execs) and the dog biscuits (for
Lucky & Flo); home taping didn't kill the music business, and file-swapping
isn't destroying theatrical revenue.