Piracy is a crime regardless of how much or how less it affects a business. A new joint study done by the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College has shown that BitTorrent piracy has actually not been negative for the U.S. box office sales. The new study, according to Daily Tech, has found that there is no link between availability of movies on BitTorrent and in-theatre movie releases. There are also cam releases and DVS screeners for free on the Internet.
The Hollywood movies are still doing business as usual depending on the quality of their creativity and artistry rather than the crime of piracy. The credit could be given to the taste that movie fans have. They want to go in theatres to watch and enjoy a movie experience than to watch freely available pirated versions that come out early, sometimes even before a movie is released in theatres or premiered in a certain region.
When a movie is banned in a certain country, these piracy sites succeed in showing the movie to those people. But piracy is illegal everywhere in the world and those who are involved in this are crossing a line with the law. This is why the international movie viewers end up choosing to see pirated online versions for free that does not benefit filmmakers. According to the research paper “Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales”:
“We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in U.S. box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.”
Furthermore the research paper said:
“We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects.”
Hence the argument by RIAA and MPAA has fallen short of both evidence and logic. Both they are still being backed by copyright groups that single out internet piracy as the only reason for the decline in sales and revenue of Hollywood movies in particular. But the researchers have suggested that their data have been pertinent only to the U.S. and they cannot say the same about international piracy.
The only solution is to release movies into more theatres worldwide and in this case, only distributors can work on their strategy to market their products better in order to reach maximum number of viewers. Also, the time of the release has to be within a short period, instead of releasing a movie months later in other countries. This will help stop internet piracy and international piracy of movies.
[ttjad]
