The MPAA is lobbying the FCC to tackle the problem of online piracy. Just why it thinks the FCC should be responsible for this sort of thing, only they will know, but it's the MPAA's latest "sky is falling" tall tales that is of interest here.
The MPAA now claims that the Internet will die if they are not allowed to kick people off it for piracy, or to implement network level filtering for usage they consider inappropriate.
After the successful broadcast of its latest
propaganda piece on 60 minutes, this latest effort to label online piracy as the biggest threat of the 21st century is part of the MPAA's new aggressive strategy, after a round up firings occured latest as movie studios were not happy at the MPAA's performance. While the MPAA has been busy suing single mothers and students, piracy has actually increased.
Telling horror stories about the consequences of people downloading stuff is one of the industry's standard tactics, as the same tactic has earned them the DMCA, and various new laws around the world that aims to kick people off the Net. It's easy to believe their tall tales when the MPAA throws around the figures of billions upon billions of lost profit, even though the profits of their movie studio members have actually increased along with the popularity of the Internet. There is also no effort to explain just how someone who never had the intention of buying a movie in the first place would cost the movie studios anything when that person downloads a pirated copy (but of course, this will count as "lost profits").
And just like the ads you see in cinemas and before DVDs, the MPAA once again compares online downloads to shoplifting a DVD from a store, showing again their ignorance when it comes to the digital revolution. Stealing a physical item from a store does have costs, since that physical item cannot be replaced without cost, to both the retailer and the movie studio. Downloading a pirated digital copy, however, has no cost, other than that of a lost sale which may or may not have occurred anyway. It's this lack of the basic understanding of digital technology that's at the heart of the MPAA's panic over the digital revolution. The fact that digital copies can be made a million times with negligible costs (compared to making a million copies of a DVD, with printing, packing, shipping ...) should be an advantage that movie studios are taking advantage of, to make digital copies cheap and affordable to compete with piracy, as opposed to trying to do the impossible and to stop all piracy. Instead, they'd rather sell $20 movies to 1,000 people, rather than sell $2 movies to 10,000 people (or more), and then punish the 9,000 people who could not afford the $20 movie and downloaded it from the Internet instead. And of course, they will count the "lost" profits ($20 x 9,000) and tell their tale of horror to anyone who will listen.
More:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...34486780.shtml
4 Nov 2009, 01:06 PM
MPAA's Latest Tall Tales: Internet Will Die If Piracy Not Stopped
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