BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Effect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds

[mcmilljb]

What about spending too much on production and the lack good original content? Spend some study time on that.

 

[coloumb]

Box off returns - so this would indicate movies only available to watch at a theater? Then yes, I would say it is not significant.

Let's see the data with regards to DVD's over bit torrents and other sources.

 

[the DRIZZLE]

That answer is that there is no way of knowing. Assuming that every pirated item is money out of the creators pocket is just plain wrong.

In the court of law, speculative damages are treated the same as no damages.

MotionMan

This isn't a court of law, it's a public policy debate on an internet forum. You are right it's extremely difficult to come up with accurate estimates. There are a lot of techniques economic consults can use to estimate them but as I said it's extremely difficult in this case.

I don't disagree with you that the content owners need to change their business models but I also don't dismiss the fact they are harmed by piracy even we don't have reliable estimates of the actual damages.

 

[frostedflakes]

Completely incorrect. People collect pirated movies, TV and music because they can. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that they would have otherwise paid for that content.

As a personal example, when I was in college in the 1980's, I had a ton of cracked Mac games and software that was freely passed around the dorms. I would have NEVER paid for any of it - not one penny.

Currently, I know people who have huge illegal movie, TV and music collections that they do not ever (or very rarely) watch or listen to - they just collect them. They would never pay for them and certainly would not pay for a movie ticket if they were not otherwise available.

On a related note, it has been shown time and time again that if something is provided with easy access and at a reasonable price, people will pay for it. If not, people will find a way to get it otherwise. The content providers need to get this through their heads.

MotionMan

I've never understood the hoarding mentality and downloading stuff that you are probably never even going to watch or listen to. Even if I could get it for free I never really got the point, just a waste of time, bandwidth, and HDD space. :\

It is quite common, though. And when trade groups claim that each lost download is a lost sale, what they're saying is that guy who has tens of thousands of pirated songs would have spent $30,000 on iTunes to buy all of them, which is obviously a ridiculous assertion. He probably would have bought some of them, sure, but the 100% (or near-100%) substitution rate they tend to assume is probably way off.

And to be fair companies have gotten a lot better about reducing or eliminating delays for international releases, the relationship between these delays and piracy is an issue they're well aware of and have been trying to improve.