Are we nearly there yet?: July 2011

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Film Piracy - gaarrgghhh!

And no, I'm not talking about Captain Jack Sparrow... or, for the record, piracy of television programmes.

I'm bored, bored of the same old arguments surrounding online piracy. Apparently, a study has just concluded that online piracy of films has risen by 29% over the past five years. This, my friends, is hardly headline news - the availability of high speed internet has increased rapidly in that period, removing the last serious barrier to the downloading of massive content, so what did they expect? The example set by music pirates was bound to be followed.

On the one hand, I disagree wholeheartedly with pirating. As an aspiring author, copyright is important to me, and I don't like to see an artist's income damaged by the activity of a group of people whose only defence is that it's too expensive to actually buy music or film. That's a little like trying to defend stealing a television from Dixons on the basis that you can't afford to buy it. It's ridiculous, and you'd never get away with it in real, physical terms, so why do you think it's OK to do it online?

On the other hand, the film industry kind of had it coming, and I have little sympathy. For years they have charged ridiculous prices to watch films in the cinema, and then they're upset that people are trying to find a way around having to take out a mortgage just to see the latest in a long line of rather average films. Seriously, guys? Come on. Cinema is, quite simply, fantastically overpriced. You can't even blame the cinemas themselves, as it's well known that the only way they make a profit is through food and drink sales. It's the distributors who set the prices in reality.

And it's not as though the production companies and the stars of these films are underpaid so that the distributors make a profit. Quite the opposite, in fact. Last year alone (2010), the top three earners in Hollywood (James Cameron, Johnny Depp and Steven Spielberg) earned a total of $437,000,000. That's a ludicrous sum.

Before you spit out your coffee, I'm well aware that most actors and producers/directors earn nowhere near those sums. In fact that disparity simply adds another string to the bow of my argument that Hollywood has nothing to complain about - only in a den of such thorough corruption could some individuals be paid so well and yet others practically starve.

Hollywood, it would seem, is beginning to reap what it has sown. For too long the industry has lived in a bubble, believing itself to be far more valuable and important than it really is. Will the world cry if the film industry collapses? Probably not. I certainly won't.