The Guardian states:
“Rampant piracy in the Asia-Pacific region cost Hollywood’s leading studios more than $896m in 2004, according to official figures just released.
Studio lobbyist the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) coordinated more than 12,000 raids of illegal DVD burning labs and other outlawed facilities in more than 13 countries last year, including China, Malaysia and Hong Kong.”
I was glad to read that the MPAA is directing their efforts to contain piracy at Asia. I believe this is a far greater problem for them than people downloading movies on their PCs. This has been going on for a long time (I remember reading about the same thing happening years ago with the music CD industry) and it has at least seemed like the U.S. has either turned a blind eye towards it, or at best given a half-hearted effort to stopping it.
I mean we’re not talking some guy in his garage here… there are huge factories set up to churn this stuff out.
So yeah, instead of wasting money on those stupid anti-movie-download commercials I have to sit through before a movie starts, why don’t you guys continue to throw your efforts behind cracking down on these theives, hmm? Time and energy is better spent there than suing 14 year olds for downloading movies and watching them on a 17″ monitor.
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1 Comments
I recently read that the piracy rate of all digital media (i.e. DVD’s, software, music, etc.) in China is over 90%. That’s absolutely staggering. The problem is, without cooperation from the Chinese government (which has left something to be desired historically), how are American organizations supposed to make any real progress? Twelve thousand raids may seem like a lot, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. With PC technology as advanced as it is today, anyone off the street can turn his home into a small production lab and make some extra money selling pirated DVD’s or music on the street. People have been buying pirated digital media on the cheap throughout much of Asia for quite a while; they won’t give that up so easily.
Having said all that, I do agree that the RIAA and MPAA should be spending less time suing teeny boppers and more time dealing with the real source of the problem. Let’s hope the solution can be found in something other than overblown copy-protection algorithms that frustrate everyone and can be disabled with a magic marker or pressing something like Ctrl-S on your keyboard.
Brian