MPAA officially admits mistakes in piracy study
Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus. The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so. But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a “human error” in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.
The MPAA says that’s still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn’t account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren’t necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks. The original report, by research firm LEK, claims the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with most of the losses overseas. It identified the typical movie pirate as a male aged 16-24. One message for MPAA: Go Fuck Yourselves. I’m wondering what random number will their piracy generator produce next time.
Source: AP
the pin of the post is the message to MPAA
1+4=3
wait…
3+4=1?
:]
downloading movies is illegal guys. but it’s only wrong sometimes.
lol when I didnt have internet in my house(2yrs ago), i dled so many stuff from my college internet all through my 20gb ipod. I dled maybe 30gb in like 5-6 months until I got caught (through lan scan) using bitcomet. But they only bannedd my internet account, wtf? I then just used one of my friends lol
Nice comment
Some great movies here this week, thanks!
fools
The Jew Mafia of Hollywood will never stop me or my 100GB ADSL2+ bandwidth connection.
MMMUUHHHAAAAAAAAA!
When will MPAA realize that their efforts to fight piracy are not actually helping them? lol
they couldn’t add if they sold their assets and moved into piratebay’s warezhouse
Well why is the piracy bigger overseas? Well let’s see the movie isn’t shown in cinemas until one —> rwo months after US premiere. I wonder why people download movies. when You can get dvdquality and subtitles and the movie hasn’t been realased in cinemas yet. then something is wrong, terribly wrong. Start thinking of world premiers.
the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide.
But they forgot to say, that they earn sometimes $1 Billion on 1 movie (Pirates)
so i think they earn several $100 Billion,
so what is 6,1 billion for them
So funny those guys, they must have not taken into account to not pay for the production of there lost sells.
Or for the reason that it explained also very good there consumer target.
they should realize that pirating movie actually increases their sales. This is due to the word-of-mouth from the downloaders and awareness of the movie it generated. if not for watching the downloaded movies i would never buy the real thing.
6.1 billion cant realy be that mutch, consider it doesnt state under what time frame and therefore mutch have been since the beginging of time, therefor it cant be more then 1% of total income.
A point I find intresting is the lose of 6.1 billion and 44% was on campus. that means that if we count that the rest of the world has 6 billion people that makes it 0.569333… dollar for eatch person, where do I send the check?
latest news: rlslog.net is to blame for 95% of internet piracy,.. mpaa is ready to atack with ther horde of letters,…
if thay would arrest everyone who download such material from the internet the state whould have to pay more for the food of those ppl than hollywood “loses”.
thay should be happy someone is watching there movies instead of moan about us not going to the cinema,..
Lust.Caution.2007.UNRATED.LiMiTED.DVDRiP.XViD-HLS
Hang on, your telling me downloading the latest films is illegal? I wish somebody had bloody told me!
Haha, so lame… its only 29% wrong in their calculation… lets just be clear: they dont know what they are talking about.
MESSAGE TO MPAA:
SUCK IT
_________________—-__
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RLSLOG RULES __\
/
_______________/
\ \
\ \
\ \
\ \ \
\_________/_/
(also my contest entry)
so much for teh ascii art i just spent 6 minutes on
I always enjoy a good laugh first thing in the morning.
just proves wot a bunch of idiots they actually are
I´m tired of this crap statements. I hate the industry for accounting for “their losses” to the exact equivalent of estimated movie downloads. The REAL number would be “the downloads that resulted in people that didn´t go to the movies BECAUSE they downloaded it”. I see about 3 movies per week and even if downloading wasn´t possible I still wouldn´t go to the movies more than once a week… and I still do for some movies. So, in my case, my “stealing” is only 33% and it´s not even that… it´s actually less because I promote the movies I see (when they are good) and I have friends that actually go see them and wouldn´t do otherwise just because I tell them at social meetings or whatever. This should be normal for all of you too.
I hope someone lightens up and stops this whole “we loose trillions… and blabla” simply because it´s a misuse of maths, statistics, and sociology.
Bad movies I download or your average Hollywood bigbudget crap without any inspiration that u just watch for 5 sec giggle. If I didn’t had the option I would never see them… Good movies I download and often I will buy those on DVD when I really like them because of superior quality and directors commentaries etc… MPAA is a low organisation going after students that don’t have salaries, no way to pay for all the movies Hollywood brings out. Let’s not forget that the students of today is the market of tomorrow but no instead of friendly behaviour , they are hostile against their very own marketgroups. And apparently every 40 million bucks film must make at least 100 million (theatrical and dvd revenue) or all those poor little producers with hunderds of millions in the bank might lose some money… Oooooooooh! How sad… UGH!? Anti-piracies and intellectual property organisations make me sick! It’s nothing more then moneyhungry bunch of wankers.
And I will be the first to support independent films as well…
Turning around numbers on ‘accident’ to get to sue people or confiscate everything they own… It just makes me sick.
End rant.
I’d like to see how much money they lost on movies that flopped or that were funded, partially shot, fully shot, etc. but never went to theaters and maybe wasn’t even good enough for a straight to DVD release. I bet they lose more than $6.1 billion each year on their own mistakes.
stupid situation here in Belgie, our university has blocked all torrents and p2p networks. so we can only download from rapidshare etc….
hehe usually comments made pirates are even dumber than those made by MPAA, “piracy increases sales”, “1% isnt much”. Childish!
Aimer has valid point even he slightly exaggerated time diffirences between premiers. But to my knowledge piracy ISNT bigger overseas.
Ponny, no, its 6 billion annual loss.
However, if mpaa etc. would want to turn current loss to clear revenue, all they need to do is release tv-shows and movies for free in public torrent site without DRM BUT with commercials.
Male, age 16-24, middle to high income family. What do you guys think which is the most important consumer target group in the world, yup, we are, the pirates.
For example, Heroes tv-show had 2.5 MILLION viewers in just mininova! Every company from consumer electronics to car manufacturers would pay great deal of money for NBC to get us see their ads.
And if you had to choose between waiting hours for illegal “heroes.s01e01.hdtv”-episode or downloading “heroes.s01e01.hdtv.ads.legit”-ep seeded by highspeed NBC seeds, which one would you go for?!
I would watch the one with the commercials.
When they put out crap i download. When they put out quality i buy. Needless to say i don’t buy very often!
Well I guess I’m safe, I’m 25
We should all stop downloading for one main reason. Brittany Spears has had to sell her private gulf stream 4 to buy a gulf stream 3 just because people downloading her music. The gulf stream 3 doesn’t even have a remote control for her built in surround sound system. lol. NOT!!!!
http://www.southparkzone.com/episodes/709/Christian-Rock-Hard.html
@Qred
“But to my knowledge piracy ISNT bigger overseas.”
This means piracy is bigger outside the US, which i know is definitely true. Maybe you haven’t noticed that some of the major public and private trackers are european?
I blame the money loss on the fact that 90% of the movies they make is crap nobody wants to see. Make a movie people will go see like the recent Cloverfield and they will make money. Even The Mist made money it has made over 100 million worldwide, (about 25 million in US) and only cost 18 million to make but Hollywood calles it a flop.
f dem! free movies!!
@32,Jesus
Haha, yeah just watch that episode and you should know what to think
“sorry we ruined so many students potential future” ? oh wait perhaps thats RIAA? lol..
The RIAA isn’t doing well either :}
The Register:
RIAA told to pay legal fees for harrassed defendant
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/17/tanya_andersen_riaa_attorneys_fees/print.html
maybe hollywood needs to re-evaluate on what they pay actors, writers, producers, etc. Paramedics get paid minimum wage to save peoples lives. Producers and actors make hundreds of thousands dollars or even millions for a year of full time work. All for a stupid movie. Maybe I exaggerated some, but you get the point.
Actors getting paid millions for a movie. PLEASE!! I act like I really care about MPAA, so how much do I get?
#39 Jonny blaze
your so right, but since when does america care about human lifes, just look at the stats… who is starting all the wars?
hang on let me get my calculator
USA:100%
Rest of the world:0%
wow this is crazy
Back on topic, the MPAA and RIAA use false logic anyway. They claim all the downloads are “lost sales” which is not true since most people who download the files would never buy the movie or music anyway. So really nobody loses anything. It’s just typical the **AA use that fake reasoning assuaming every download is a lost sale.
Fighting piracy is the same thing as fighting the war in Iraq.
Not going to win.
@40, Shut up an don’t start trying to spark a political debate on who’s country is better an whose country is a puss. Cause in the long run no one on here is gonna make a difference. Keep the site clean of bs. And can someone tell me if this torrent is legit? Its the only decent copy of “The Mist” i have seen.
http://www.torrentportal.com/details/1679103/The.Mist.R5.XViD.Neptune.html
I got to agree with Aimer. I have seen sometimes that when some movie that has been released in US can almost take a year before it finally gets here where I live. Mostly its of course about few months but sometimes it really takes long before they get released here. So of course if there is a dvdrip or R5 already I get it if its good enough movie then, I go see it in the theater also.
forget theatres, most movies are not even released on dvd (atleast not in india) ….so what choice do people have?
order it from amazon/ebay (which would double the cost coz of shipping)
or
download it for free in perfect quality…..
you get the point….
expect the MPAA next year to say “piracy is up 20% since 2007″
No way… that number has to be off…. sure i have $1 billion in movies myself….
Its still the same, money, money, money. That is what keeps film industries running. People are greedy as hell, they are getting ridiculous amount of money for nothing (sorry to those few people who are doing it for the sake of art…)
Well, sometimes the world is a sick place, thank god for East Germany porn
And I have my own conspiracy theory of MPAA- Its lead by mysterious “man” called Uve Boll and you can imagine, that he is getting fu..ing crazy about nobody is actually paying for that expensive crap… PeAce
“tessk
January 24th, 2008 | 13:50
The Jew Mafia of Hollywood will never stop me or my 100GB ADSL2+ bandwidth connection.
MMMUUHHHAAAAAAAAA!”
not a single jew is on the mpaa. in fact they actually have several priests
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated
so go f yourself tessk, you good for nothing racist
@38
Interesting article, I preferably enjoyed this one part, “Recording Industry Ass. of America”. Everyone, please note the word Ass.
Looks to me that the MPAA needs to go back to school and learn their 1,2,3s.
cant beleive the MPAA get paid, wasta money & wasta effort
Illegal downloading is wrong. Everyone that does so should stop. Just watch your old dvd’s or vhs’ tapes. Also go pay 8-10$ for a movie with a bunch of people that dont shut up, and where you cant smoke a blunt, pause or take a break. People that are pirates should just stop……yeah im sure
arse assasins
VHS ha-hahahahahahahahah,if theres a good movie on at the cinema i still go, it just means i can avoid the one’s thats crap.
Great line to finish the article with. The reality is people still pay for “quality” movies, I think in Britain we had one of the best years in terms of money made by cinemas, the film industry is not dying. I download movies usually because of big delays in American movies being released in Britain (Miramax are the most guilty), surely world wide simultaneous releases is the way to go? Sometimes I download something, such as the Futurama movie, and then I buy it upon release as I think the show deserves support.
Its not as cut and dried as the MPAA make things out to be, looking at the comments, especially from outside the US, people clearly see major faults in the movie distribution industry, so why not try to address these issues instead of producing fictitious statistics and harrasing innocent people MPAA!
They are just pissed coz ppl can preview movies they arent sure they want to spend $12 a ticket on. “well…it looks good” (yeah coz they’ve shown ALL the good/funny scenes in the trailers)
Its the big “Fooled You” scheme. The movie LOOKED good- “But wait- the only funny parts are in the trailer? Damn! I’m walking out” (Movie execs just shrug- they dont care if you even walk in to see the movie- they are just happy you bought that $12 ticket)
Art is created for the love of art and the sharing of ideas/love with all that will listen/watch/smell/taste. If they love it and want more, maybe they’ll donate money to you, or find a place for you to create your art and sustain it for you. Its a sick world we live in, where people can trademark terms like “Thats HOT!” and so on. Awful.
Oh yeah and if I can add the spam protection, then the stupid a$$ MPAA should be able to get their figures right. Idiot hyper-capitalists, they be.
we all know its wrong.
we all do it.
its always gonna happen.
get over it mpaa.
I would so like to see a study on the commercial value of the pr piracy creates. Afterall, even a short 30 s commercial on tv is, if the numbers i heard years ago, equivalent to say 1/4 of a million.
And how many care about 30 min commercial?
Right… 30 seconds. Not minutes. I got it right half of the post at least :S
@19 dilligaf: you can’t use tabs in ascii art only spaces and enter or i won’t show up right.
and that they lose 6.1 billion doesn’t mean anything, what about the billions more they make from people buying movies that have downloaded, otherwie they would of enver heard of, or wanted to buy. I know I have bought more movies since I have downloaded more…
I can’t believe the mpaa is too folkin stupid to make money off all this.
How about, tack a couple of paid previews onto a 700mb xvid scr and let it go. Everyone I know likes previews, 700mb xvid isn’t exactly DVD quality, and a watermark like on TV would identify the film as a screener. Everyone wins.
Or just set up a torrent website with 700mb screeners you can download for a small amount.
Or… there must me a dozen more models to consider. It won’t stop piracy, but it’ll cut it down some.
MPAA needs to enter the 21st century, fire it’s cognitively impaired attorneys and marketing strategists, and come up with a realistic plan to get their “artists” some cash out of all this.
Anyway, the public demand for downloadable movies from commercial sites like iTunes and Amazon is sure to pick up and competition should bring the prices down to where even us cheapskates will fork over US$2 or $3 for a flick.
Nah, the problem isn’t tabs or spaces, it’s that HTML doesn’t show multiple space after eachother.
Only 1 or 2 will work, then there has to be some other character.
A couple people have touched on it but the real problem they have with so called pirates is that they do lose money from theaters and dvds. but thats because they make sh!t movies and can’t sell us a 12$ ticket and a $20 dvd from 30 seconds of the movie anymore because we see it first and know it isn’t worth the trip.
Either make movies worth seeing/buying or go to hell.
I also agree with the idea of ads in stuff. They would still make their money on garbage like they wanna and we wouldn’t have to waste money on it like we’re already not going to anyways.
who has time to watch movie in the theater this days? I say shut down the theater and start releasing movies in the PPV or Internet PPV…The cost of the movie will go down from 7-10$ to 3-5$ because the studio don’t have to make any more dvds just pay for the bandwidth…I say give it a shot and move on…Piracy is hurting the studio but its benefiting actors/actress…There is more free users then the paid users…
I’m worried about when I got o college, because i don’t know how I’ll download my movies anymore. But right now I only download them because I live in a small town and don;t get the opportunity to see all the movies I want, especially this time of the year (Oscar season) because a lot of them aren’t considered ‘main stream’ enough for my town to put in our theatre, so downloading is mostly my only option. Sorry to Hollywood, but if you want me to watch your movies in theatres, put them in my theatre. The MPAA needs to calm down, because all of us just scoff, get a bit angry write a comment, turn around and download some more movies.
@29 Qred,
*IF* the video quality was equal to or better than what you could get with a pirated copy and *IF* it was DRM-free, I’d happily download a legal copy with the commercials included. Of course, I probably would just skip the commercials, like I do with anything I record from cable, but I’d still download it.
Had to drop a comment on this one! I agree with the peoples saying things like “If the movie is good enough I’ll go see it at the cinema!” And how can we know if it’s good enough? Yeah, thats right. If only Hollyweird could find some way of continually pumping out the massive turds they keep laying on us. If only there was some way of keeping us from spreading the word about the stink. If only they could enforce crazy fines and life destroying court proceedings on us. Then all they would need to do is bribe a few ball-less, soul-less media hacks to give positive reviews to said turds and SURELY the money’ll keep rolling in. SURELY!!!! Vote with your middle finger brothers and sisters. AHOY.
This is one of my favorite quotes:
I couldn’t agree more!
Although this article talks about music in particular, I think it applies to all things that are pirated. Simply replace “music” with “movie”, “game”, or “application”. So, when these companies talk about losses, I say BULLSHÏT!
I loved the message to the MPAA! LOL! Great Read!
How does the MPAA even justify the sales lost figures? What they don’t realize and should probably take into account is this fact: people dl movies to actually see if they are even worth wasting time on. Heck i’m sure everyone here scans a fresh dl quick before they sit and watch a steamin pile of shiet for 2 hrs. Most of the movies are garbage, a handfull perhaps are worth watching every year. So, when they estimate 15% revenue loss, they automatically assume every dl is a full priced ticket or dvd-(a scenario that is insanely if not impossibly optimistic).
Man, movie ticket is hella expensive, old movie shows a lot better acting. Now it’s just F/X and CG….don’t get me wrong…i like it too. Hollywood running out of idea on movies idea. OH yeah what the f*ck up with fantasy movies like Harry Potter for kiddy that coming out now.
People from other countries make less than a buck a day. We paying way too much.
Actors get pay way tooo much … many time a lot of terriable acting