Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another record-breaking box-office year

[LDoBe]

@LDoBe

Also, since the internet and piracy took off, there’s actually been far more art available to the public because small producers, like the guys who made Primer, for instance, don’t have to play ball with the nasty gross MPAA.

@Nonentity

Really? All the films are now regurgitated?

Sure, there’s a lot of sequels and remakes, but that’s been going on for a long time.

@Nonentity

Just how long has it been since those were Hollywood’s balliwick?

@Nonentity

Demolition Man already came out eight years before the bittorrent protocol was released.

@Brainspore

iTunes didn’t come to dominate the market for digital music in the late 90s because people couldn’t use Napster anymore. It came to dominate the market because Apple was the first commercial entity to build an online music store that provided a superior user experience at a price that people were willing to pay.

@robulus

Such a bullshit argument. There’s never been a greater choice of entertainment, we are living in the golden age of TV. The stranglehold of a few major studios is breaking, and now producers have so many more options, so much more creative freedom, there is a greater variety of higher quality art than ever before.

Basically, you might have an argument, if what you said was actually true.

Enjoy.

[Israel_B]

Correct.

1. Eat the rich
2. What’s is yours is mine

[Israel_B]

And still not worth the price tag

[ficuswhisperer]

As Negativland would say, “Just say N©”.

[robulus]

Touché!!!

[LDoBe]

[miasm]

@MegaDorothyD

Quality art takes investment in the artists who make it. Your flippant dismissal of piracy shows you fail to understand what’s at stake.

Except people who pirate media tend to spend more money on media than non pirates because, and you’ll be surprised when you hear this, they like media.

Just like all those damn radio listeners killing the music industry!

When the people you are targeting for piracy are also some of your best customers, there’s a hole in your logic somewhere.

The only people who gain from the modern notion of piracy are the lawyers who have successfully managed to manipulate studio execs, leveraging their own sense of hysterical greed against them, laughing all the way to the bank.

[L_Mariachi]

@MegaDorothyD

Gone are most of the marginal films that tell stories that may not draw mega-millions at the box office.

What exactly are you referring to? Arthouse “marginal” films have almost never been shown in mass-market cineplexes, and with the past couple decades of technological progress it’s potentially less expensive than ever to make and distribute professional-quality movies.

Take an hour or two browsing Vimeo. Most of the stuff on there would have been flat-out impossible as recently as 1996 – not because computers were slow and expensive and bad at rendering whizbang special effects, but simply because you couldn’t rent a comparable film camera package (plus dailies, plus workprints, plus interpositives, plus timing, plus answer prints, plus internegatives, plus release prints, plus shipping the reels to theaters…) for the price of a mid- to high-end digital camera package today.

There has never in the history of photography been a more fecund era of creative empowerment than we are living in right now. But you have to dig just a scoche deeper than dropping $12 on Superhero Franchise Crossover Sequel 3 on the fake IMAX screen at your local mall to see it.

[NickSay]

Record profits? Again?

I wonder if they’ll be ready to start paying taxes soon…

Hollywood accounting