Nevermind that profits have been skyrocketing since 2005, and that it’s enjoying yet another year of record profits.
Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, had a few choice words in an op-ed published on the Times Online recently that discussed piracy and its effect on the movie industry, but what he says just doesn’t add up.
Firstly, he says that one of the reasons why he decided to release the upcoming film Michael Jackson’s This Is It to “almost everywhere in the world tomorrow” is because otherwise CAM copies would be freely available to those where it was not, presumably implying that they diminish ticket sales.
What’s wrong with this is that the MPAA already announced earlier this year that it was enjoying another in a series of domestic as well as overseas box office ticket sales dating as far back as 2005.
If CAMs were such a problem then why is it doing so well? It could arguably be losing some money it could have earned otherwise, but you can’t calculate the intangible. My experience is that if a movie’s good fans will go and see it, CAM copy be dammed (The Dark Knight anyone?).
What a global release has done is given movie fans what they want (imagine that). Instead of having to wait patiently while people elsewhere rave about a particular movie they’ve seen and only imagine what it’s like, they can finally join in what has become a global entertainment market.
What P2P has done is democratized content distribution. If you refuse to deliver movies or other content to a particular locale then people there will simply acquire it from somebody else.
How is that a bad thing?
Lynton adds that P2P harms “‘art house’ or independent films [that] cannot afford to open globally” and that it thereby “hurts their chances of building an international audience.” This in turn deprives them of “entire markets where stolen versions of their work have proliferated online.”
That may be so, but P2P has also dramatically increased their ability to be seen in other markets. Studios that have deemed some movies unprofitable or undesirable to distribute can find a ready audience online. How to monetize that is the real question.
Secondly, he claims that file-sharing is “siphoning” billions from the movie marketplace and that the number of movies produced has been scaled back over the years (40 fewer since 2006). If that’s the case, then where are all the record profits it keeps reporting? Are they being “siphoned” by file-sharers as well?
Lastly, the only he thing he does remarkably acknowledge correctly is that he needs to beat pirates at their own game by giving them what they want.
“I know that to beat the pirates we must give audiences fast, easy, affordable and legal access to the movies that we produce,” he continues. “The film industry has to change quickly, and we are working hard to do that.”
Exactamundo.
Content creators will win every time in the categories of quality and delivery. A CAM copy grabbed from Usenet or BitTorrent will never stack up to a a clean DVD copy streamed right to your Internet-connected TV.
Sadly, part of his plan to create this marketplace includes just the sort of heavy handed tactics that turns his prospective costumers off.
“But to build the kind of marketplace that allows us to innovate and take advantage of the opportunities that digital distribution opens, we need help from those who make and enforce intellectual property laws,” he says.
“I’m not talking about state-imposed preservation of the status quo but I do support proposals that target people who persistently upload content for illegal file sharing, so that they can be warned by their ISP to stop, or face temporary suspension of their account.”
If your household was disconnected from the Internet, especially if due in part to Wi-Fi hijacking, it’s highly unlikely you’ll want to have anything to do with Sony Pictures or any other movie studio again.
What he also fails to mention is why many file-sharers turn to P2P in the first place. Things like DVD/Blu-ray regional encoding and the Content Scrambling System, and its insistence that making even one backup copy is illegal also contribute greatly to piracy.
Perhaps Mark Cuban said it best last year.
“The MPAA is staring right in the face of a paradox and they must make a choice,” he writes. “They can continue to invest in the war on Digital Piracy (as opposed to physical DVD piracy, which can be monitored and slowed by confiscating actual DVDs and duplication equipment), or they can invest in promoting the fun of going to the movies.”
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
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I seriously wonder if this guy is hinting at importing a 3 strike regime in the US.
I can only hope that movie companies realize that they need to turn movies around into DVD releases at a faster pace. Right now the time lag between theater release and DVD release is so long it leaves the market for a shitty ‘cam’ version -=wide open=-. if the movie was released to DVD sooner then the market for cammed movies would dry up. Then we could all laugh at the cammers rather than blaming them for any supposed “lost profits”.
Sony doesn’t complain when they profit from the cameras being used to cam those movies, nor the profit made from converting those movies on a Viao. Or even the sales of walkmans due to people viewing the cams on the go.
lol CAMs that noone watches are ruining the movie biz. Try the 3 strike rule and we shall rise above it.
Moon never came to my town. I had to put up with the rave reviews and had little opportunity to see it in the theater. I patiently waited for DVD/BD. Sony fucked the US with that too. UK BD and DVD release is Nov 16th. US is Dec 29 for DVD and Jan 10 2010 for BD. Why? What are you trying to accomplish Sony? All of your US fans that want to see it will just get it off the internet from a UK rip.
Moon was awesome!