John Lyons Murphy A study released last month by The London School of Economics opens with statements that suggest piracy shouldn’t be as much a focus as creative industries struggle to evolve:
The creative industries are innovating to adapt to a changing digital culture and evidence does not support claims about overall revenue reduction due to individual copyright infringement.
Then there’s Variety’s report this week, about The Walking Dead being “feasted on by Internet pirates”:
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“The Walking Dead” season four premiere—after tearing into a huge TV audience Sunday—was downloaded illegally by more than 500,000 people around the world within 16 hours of the episode first showing up on illegal download sites, according to piracy website TorrentFreak.
Imagine that those 500,000 people had actually bought the episode on iTunes, for example, at $3 a pop. That’d be $1.5m in sales for AMC, and let’s just guess and say iTunes takes one third of the revenue and AMC gets the rest. So AMC would have made $1m on this premiere episode more than they did, ballpark.
That’s certainly an argument against piracy—not on the morality of stealing, but on the actual bottom line of the content creator. Now I’m sure AMC can afford not to make that extra million on Dead since it’s such a massive hit, but what if it were a struggling show just riding the line? Would the people illegally watching that struggling show ultimately be killing it? Or, is it an even trade, to give away a million to piracy instead of to ad buys? In the end, they accomplish the same thing: sharing/spreading of the series. And, since the downloads were worldwide, the spread was beyond what the traditional ad buy would have accomplished in print or broadcast TV.
The London School of Economics’ report indicates that creative industries are, indeed, growing, in the face of piracy:
Despite the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of USD 35 bn in 2012, a 6% increase over 2011. While US film industry revenues from the sale and rentals of DVDs have decreased by 10% (USD 4.7 bn) from 2001 to 2010, total global revenues for the US industry increased by 5% or USD 4.5 bn over the same period.
A 6% increase in box office over 2011 is pretty solid. A 10% decrease in sales and rentals of DVDs from 2001 to 2010 is way less than I would have expected, so that’s good. Total revenues up 5% over 10 years, though? I’m not an economist but I’d imagine that’s not all that spectacular when you take into account inflation. But then you take into consideration the reason behind the fluxuating DVD numbers: newly refined distribution channel that never existed before –Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, Amazon Instant, Epix, Vudu, and all the rest. If the creative industries can’t exploit these new digital platforms to replace declining DVD sales, they’ll be wishing for those pirated revenues, but it will be on them and not the pirates for the turnaround. Pirates have been taking what they’ve wanted for thousands of years. And every outfit fighting them—whether on the Barbary Coast or the online—have continued forward.
Regardless of your opinion, what we can take away from this study is that the creative industries are doing okay. Just okay. Piracy hasn’t destroyed the entertainment world the way some prognosticators thought it would. But . . . it isn’t supporting them either. It’s still stealing no matter how you look at it. And just as everyone who has fought piracy throughout history will tell you: You can’t completely eliminate piracy, but you can get around it. It’s an unfortunate part of life, but also a part that shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way.
This article originally appeared on AboutFace Media and has been republished with permission.
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