There's been a large influx in interest in BitTorrent piracy recently due to the record-breaking 24'000 plus US residents currently facing court action and possible prosecution over allegedly illegally downloading the Oscar nominated film, The Hurt Locker. This high-profile case highlights the scale of the problem of piracy for the movie industry, and the lengths that they will go to in order to make sure potential viewers 'cough up' their cash for the legitimate experience, yet it also highlights a fundamental problem that both helped initiate and exacerbate the sheer mass of piracy we see today.
The fundamental problem that causes the most piracy is: property price and monotony distribution throughout the film industry. You see, films made huge profit for many companies throughout the 20th century, brining perhaps tens of millions of pounds in profit per film. This money allowed for great investment, high-profile advertisements and a rapid saturation of the market.
When a film is under production, a producing company will invest money into a film and, in turn, own the rights to the film. When the film is released, the producing company will make their money back in royalties from cinemas, and from royalties in DVD and Blu-Ray sales, thus covering their original investment and potentially bringing in profit.
A downside to this is that producing companies will often fund any legal venture that is likely to turn a profit, regardless of the film's quality, leading to poor quality sequels and badly made parodies, riding off the success of other, better films.
The problem with this that invokes piracy is thus: all films, even the poor quality ones, are charged at between £6 and £7 in cinemas for a screening. During this screening, no physical copies are released to the public, you can't pause when you need to go to the lavatory, and you can't even watch from the comfort of your own sofa; instead you must spend further money and effort to travel to a large room, filled with generally squashed seating and murmuring or laughing customers surrounding you.
The commonness of this means that few people complain. "A trip to the cinema? O.K. then, sounds nice"… why? What part of it sounds nice? I go to the cinema fairly regularly, but thinking about it, I don't know why. I could wait two years to see the film on DVD, pay a similar price, watch it as many times as I like, pause, resume and sit on my own sofa and relax. So why do we accept this silly price tag? Well, not all of us do, hence piracy. If we wanted to partially reduce piracy, we'd have to reduce cinema costs, meaning reducing film royalties to the production companies.
But if we reduce costs to the production companies, the film budgets would equally suffer, thus affecting film quality, would it not? I would argue: no. Currently, unnecessarily large sums of money are spent on actors for roles, which itself is an issue to address. Their lucrative lifestyles are in turn funded by our ridiculous cinema ticket prices.
What's more, if the budget were tighter, production companies would have to spend more time actually considering the profitability of a film, which in turn would mean a reduction is silly, pointless and below-quality films, such as Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans. The fact that these films, which are often written with little refinement and casting low-quality actors, are charged at the same price in a cinema as a high-quality, well scripted movie, building on years of script refinement and featuring high-quality actors and cutting edge special effects is utterly insulting.
Regardless to this, it can also be noted that if prices were increased a sensible degree, there is a statistically higher probability of people actually going to the cinema, thus impairing the deficit of reduced ticket prices.
But that's not all! Regardless of the fact that most production companies make their profit back on cinema sales, DVD prices continue to bring in revenue for the production company, adding further to their profit, giving revenue for further film investments. So why, when a DVD is first released, does it commonly retail for anything between £12 and £20, depending on box-office success? The pricing here is utterly absurd when one considers it fully. If we were to watch a film each week – a brand-new release DVD that we bought, let's say – it would clock up between £648 and a staggering £1080 in costs… per year! That's certainly a sobering thought, thinking that if we legitimately and actively supported the film industry, we could easily be 'dishing out' several hundred pounds each year.
Even DVDs that have been released for several months – even years – often cost over £5 each, still giving a total of over £250.
So, whilst piracy is wrong and can't be condoned at all, I would certainly argue that it's understandable why it happens on such a scale, and its an element that has been bought about by the very agents attempting to shut it down.
The production company's selfish and greedy attitudes – marred with irresponsible spending – ended up creating overpriced 'intellectual property', and they wonder why so many are reluctant to pay!
The solution to this problem is not to sue those perpetrating the trend – there will be many more that'll fill the space. The solution, the best solution, perhaps the only real solution, is to lower prices and entice customers with more reasonable cinema ticket prices and DVD costs. If they have to pay £3 for a cinema ticket, I can guarantee a lot more people will go, and a lot more often!
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