Bully boy Jack Valenti and his crew of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) enforcers met with their counterparts from France, India, China and Russia amidst the beautiful-people hobnobbing at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend. The tête-à-tête between film industry execs was organised to map out a cross-border anti-piracy strategy, with a focus on what to do before video downloading takes off like music downloading has.
Mr Valenti was infuriated by comments by the this year’s head of the festival’s jury, Quentin Tarantino, to the effect that he was okay with people pirating his films in countries where they weren’t available. He called on Mr Tarantino and other directors and actors who have been indifferent to film piracy to get on board with the anti-piracy campaigning of industry executives.
Mr Valenti, a former aide to LBJ, was sounding the alarm about digital piracy, saying that while online video piracy hasn’t taken off to the extent that music piracy has, as soon as the technology or bandwidth appears that does away with the current twelve-hour wait for downloading a film, the industry will be seriously threatened.
“Suppose you can [download] a movie in five minutes, piracy will explode like a pandemic,” he said.
He’s right in a sense. Where music downloading is often used to “test drive” new music (with anecdotal evidence suggesting that since the advent of music download services, music aficionados have increasingly been buying more CDs) movies are, more or less, a play-once-or-twice thing. Where songs are listened to over and over again, most movies are only watched once, with a few favourites bearing repeated viewing. However, as with illegal music downloading, illicit film downloading is fraught with issues of wildly varying quality, difficulty in finding what you’re looking (barring the most popular hits) and, of course, viruses. A decent legal broadband film download/video-on-demand service, akin to iTunes, Napster, et al, but for films and TV – if it can be set up before Mr Valenti’s “nightmare scenario”, with the advantages of being first to market, quality assurance and a comprehensive selection of films – will not only allow the industry to steal a march on the pirates, but will also open up new revenue streams.
As usual, the industry needs to embrace the technology for its own good, rather than, like King Canute, sitting on the seashore commanding the waves advance no further.
