Costs of Piracy?
This thing has been going all around for the past few days.
We’ve all heard the MPAA and the RIAA whine, whine, whine about how Internet piracy has basically destroyed the movie/TV/software/music/video game industry–citing famous studies that estimate as much as $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost in a year. But now the government is stepping in and admitting what many kind of suspected–those studies are often misleading.
I don’t “pirate” anything myself. I guess I’ve downloaded a thing or two over the years. But I never adopted it as a habit for a couple of reasons. First, even though I love sticking it to THE MAN as much as the next guy, I actually do think it’s wrong to take things in a way that the owner doesn’t intend. Secondly, as a content creator, I just feel like it’s inviting bad Karma. Because no matter how I decide to distribute my content, that’s me making that decision. And I would like people to abide by it. Thirdly, it’s just too easy not to pirate. If I want to see something, I can usually just buy it pretty easily. And I can know I’m getting a quality product. The few times I have downloaded, it was slow, and quality was always just unacceptable. I’ve read online that that means I’m just not doing it right, or not going to the right places, or whatever. But that’s precisely my point. It’s just easier now to go to iTunes, or Netflix, or wherever, and just watch something.
But the thing that struck me about this report was the part about how the industry assumes that every download is a lost sale. This is where they make the biggest mistake, I think. Because generally, would the people downloading anything and everything, be buying anything and everything if they had to go through the trouble and expense? Probably not.
So if they are not losing sales, are they in fact gaining anything from piracy?
Piracy as Promotion
There is a portion of the DIY movement right now, that thinks piracy can act as a kind of free promotion. Meaning, if you allow people to download your movie on BitTorrent, they might spread the word about the movie. Or IMDB or something will show that you were the most downloaded movie this week, and that might somehow turn into sales. Or interest.
I think this is interesting and it certainly would be great if it were true. This happened to the film INK. I’m not sure what ever came of this, but they were extremely popular in the BitTorrent community for a while. And it was their hope that it would translate into sales, I certainly hope it did. I bought the DVD sight unseen just because I loved how open and honest and gracious the filmmakers were with their journey in getting the film made. The film was pretty good too. Certainly a breath of fresh air amid so much of the drek that stinks up the indie film universe.
But more importantly and more probably, I think this piracy as promotion thing will have legs, not for the film that’s being pirated, but for the films you haven’t made yet. If you can show companies that you can make something millions of people will want to see, you might have made an investment in your career. Of course, the trick is to do this for an amount of money you can afford to lose. But I always say, if I cannot make something compelling for $300, I will never make something compelling for $3mil.
But large companies are in the best position to experiment with this. And I think they’ve even been accused of doing so; seeding bit torrents with their own copies in an effort to track popularity. If they can indeed do this, then they’ve won this battle. Because the questionable number of lost sales is nothing compared to the amount of very low-cost marketing data they’ll get.
Ultimately, I’m not sure piracy will lead to real sales for the independent filmmaker. As I said, corporations can afford to float some experiments out there, and can also spread the pain over a broad area. Independent filmmakers don’t have these luxuries. Besides, from what I’ve heard the amounts of money being made this way are nothing really.
There are examples like Nina Paley, who made the movie Nita Sings the Blues, and gave it away for free. She’s become something of a legend on the DIY talk-circuit for making some money back this way. Giving it away for free leading to selling swag, “official” dvd copies, etc. She has made money this way, but nothing approaching real money, nothing that could support more than one person, much less a company.
There’s also VODO, which is a sort of tip jar for BitTorrent. If you download something and like it, you can “donate” to its creator. I kind of like this idea in theory, as I love the idea that you have to be satisfied by a product before you pay for it. Years ago, those of us who are old enough remember having to buy an entire crappy album just to get one or two good songs. But in practice, this isn’t working out too well either. VODO is not delivering anything remotely like real money. And I don’t think it will. Because generally, I just don’t think the people who download have enough respect for content creators.