Film Pirates

The Motion Picture Association of America has been dealing with movie piracy since long before the creation of Web 2.0, but today the MPAA is seeing severe losses of revenue because of this new trend of illegal file sharing. Unlike a pirated DVD being sold on the street, once a movie is uploaded onto the internet can be copied an infinite amount of times and easily downloaded by anyone who has a computer.

In Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, he explains the enormous impact that movie piracy has on the industry. Keen says:

But the worst is still to come. As the bandwidth revolution makes it increasingly easy to download movies from the internet, Hollywood is about to become engulfed in the same storm that has wrecked the music industry.

I agree that downloading movies is easy. One can download a full length movie that is still in theaters in less than 30 minutes for free. With technology rapidly advancing, Keen predicts the number of people downloading movies online to jump from 600,000 in 2007 to over 50 million in 2010. He says that 49 million of them will be downloading illegally.

When production companies lose money die to piracy, they are forced to lay off employees and work with a smaller production budget. Potentially compromising the quality of the films they produce. Keen presents an example of this in his book:

At the Walt Disney Company, domestic ticket sales plummeted from $1.5 billion to $962 million between 2003 and 2005, and studio entertainment revenues dropped 13 percent in 2005, largely due to lagging DVD sales. Recently, Disney was forced to eliminate 650 jobs and substantially cut the number of films it produces each year.

I'm hoping that the film industry finds a way to adapt to the changes that web 2.0 is bringing, or else our future will be filled with low-budget cookie-cutter films that no one will even want to pirate.