Great research on movie piracy
Kudos to Los Angelino Andy Baio for putting together a fabulous review of online movie piracy since 2003. It's mainly raw data today; Baio promised to offer some analysis on his blog, Waxy.org, tomorrow. Focusing on a slice of the film industry -- the titles that earned Academy Award nominations for their producers, actors or crew -- Baio examined how many days elapsed between the movie's release and the availability of various bootlegged versions online. Such movies aren't always in demand online; blockbusters seem to draw more attention from the scene than critical favorites (especially period dramas). So if anything, these titles move online more slowly than the average Hollywood film. Which is not to say that they dawdle en route to the darknet. By Baio's calculation, this year's Oscar nominees were bootlegged online only four days, on average, after they were released to theaters. And DVD-quality bootlegs were available online less a week after the official DVD was released to video stores or mailed to Oscar voters.
Baio's analysis will no doubt be better than mine, but here's my takeaway
from his data.
The industry's many efforts to curb recording in theaters may have slowed bootleggers by a day or two, but they're still pirating just about everything. "Across the Universe" doesn't seem to have been cammed, but that's probably because no one tried, not because anyone was foiled. "American Gangster" wasn't cammed, either, because a high-quality copy of the film was available online almost two weeks before its U.S. premier.
One bright point for Hollywood is that fewer Oscar screeners were bootlegged this year than in the previous five go-arounds. On the other hand, Baio's research suggests that the studios' watermarks and enforcement efforts aren't the reason. Rather, it seems that fewer screener DVDs have been sent out this season than previously. In fact, the only nominees this year that have yet to yield high-quality bootlegs are the ones that haven't been released as screeners or commercial DVDs.
Image of the coveted Oscar statuette courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website, Oscar.org.
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Piracy for a film certainly spikes at the release, but the real threat is the competitive pressure it puts on the studios own digital offerings. What's remarkable about the list isn't when you could get the films, but the fact that you can still get ALL OF THEM today as a digital download. If the studios would allow all of their content to be put online in a portable format, it would cut the piracy problem in half. Instead they want to play games with release windows, limited availability and old unwatchable content, all in an effort to protect what they earn on packaged media. It's easy to focus on the losses that the studios take from piracy, but I bet it's more than offset by what they are overcharging on the DVD side of the equation.
Posted by: Davis Freeberg | February 05, 2008 at 05:00 PM
I live in South Florida and my gal pal came by with a DVD of I Am Legend that she bought for 15 bucks in Ft. Lauderdale 2 weeks before it hit the theatre. Good movie, I would have gone to see it. As a matter of fact, I had planned to. But face it- the movies would have cost 50 bucks at least and we watched it on the patio while we BBQ"d and sipped wine. This bootlegging cannot be stopped anymore than the drug dealers can. I do not pretend to know the answer. Technology today coupled with the Net seems unbeatable and the People will not stand for Internet control by the government.
Posted by: dionysis | February 07, 2008 at 02:13 PM