Movie Piracy

The subject of my paper focuses on movie piracy. Movie Piracy by definition is the illegal copying of movies for personal or commercial use. This is a new epidemic that is affecting the film industry financially on a global level. What are the necessary steps that can be taken on behalf of the film industry that can stop this illegal practice from occurring? Once you walk down the city streets of New York, you can easily find vendors selling their bootleg DVD copies of new released movies for half the price of a movie ticket. At the moment the quality of the movies aren't at its best, but with the technological advancements, the quality of these bootleg DVD's are getting better, which means that movie piracy is actually on the rise. This continues to worry both film studios and copyright activist. Movie companies are the ones suffering the most from this illegal practice. While they continue to produce $100 million movies, their profits continue to fall, when people decide to either pick up a burned copy or download the movie off some illegal Internet site. This essay takes a look at the different forms of movie piracy and what different organizations, such as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and its international counterpart, MPA (Motion Picture Association), are doing to combat this illegal practice.

There are many different forms of piracy and can all affect the movie industry in various ways. The most common type is known as "Optical Disc Piracy," which is a major threat to the movie industry. "Pirate optical discs, which include Laser Discs (LD), Video Compact Discs (VCD) and Digital Versatile Discs (DVD), are inexpensive to manufacture and easy to distribute. In 2000, over 20 million pirate optical discs were seized, and by comparison, 4.5 million videos were seized worldwide in the same period" (Anti-Piracy). Most of this bootleg movies are made through the common practice of recording the movie with a hand held camcorder in the theatres and then being copied or burned onto a VHS or DVD. Illegal copies of certain box office movies are also made from legitimate advance copies of these movies, which are used for screening and marketing purposes. For that reason, one cannot be mistaken into thinking that people in the streets commit most of the piracy. There was investigation done by AT&T and the University of Pennsylvania that proved that 80% of movie piracy is committed through industry insiders (Knight).

Another form of movie piracy is Internet piracy. By definition online motion picture piracy is "the unauthorized use of copyrighted motion pictures on the Internet" (Anti-Piracy). As any other form of piracy, it is illegal to sell, trade, distribute, upload for transmission, transmit or publicly perform motion pictures online without the consent of the motion pictures' copyright owner. Although online piracy is a new phenomenon, it is unfortunately a growing trend. The way online piracy works is that digital files, also known as downloadable media, is made into a digital copy by making an illegal VCD copy of movie. Once this is done, the movies are recorded into a computer file, which is easily transferred to other computer users by simply downloading the file into their computers. This is practiced through several online communication outlets. Such as chat rooms, Internet Relay Chats (IRC), File Swapping Utilities (FSUs), newsgroups, and most commonly used, different Web sites that offer the illegal option of download movies.

In the year 2000, the average major film production cost a total of $80 million per film, $55 million to produce the film with an extra $27 million spent for marketing and advertising. Movie piracy is such a profitable illegal practice, that the MPAA/MPA have estimated that the U.S. motion picture industry loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue. "Unfortunately because of this practice, only one in ten films ever retrieves its investment from a film release and Internet losses cause untold additional damages to the industry" (Anti-Piracy). The MPAA/MPA however has done several studies on Internet piracy in which they have concluded that one out of four Internet users have illegally downloaded. This trend of Internet downloading is only increasing, "Ð'...with 17 percent of respondents who have not yet downloaded movies online saying that they expect to start within the next year. Furthermore, 58 percent of current downloaders expect to continue the practice, the MPAA says. Those who described themselves as downloaders had already pirated an average of 11 films each" (Pruitt).

To battle this piracy problem the MPAA/MPA has taken several steps to overcome this illegal practice. In the year 2000, the MPA launched over 60,000 investigations into suspected pirate activities. Over 18,000 raids were also conducted against pirate operations in coordination with local authorities around the world. In some parts of the world, copyright