The Piracy Meter

Earlier, I mentioned the Piracy Meter, defined as a gage for rating movies. If I pirated movies (which I don't), I'd rate them as to what's worth clogging my dsl connection for 24-36 hours to get one.

Well, it looks as though in a backhanded way, Variety has decided the Piracy Meter is right on target. No, they didn't mention the Piracy Meter directly (but I'm sure if they knew about the Piracy Meter, they would have!). Only Ernie Miller did, suggesting a quality scale. But Variety did say that "Illegal downloading of films via the Internet may not be the financial catastrophe many fear, at least not for some time." In other words, they say that according to a new study, "Films on the Internet," the movie biz has been more in touch with their customers than the record industry (not hard to do, but still), offering movies at a reasonable price (often the same or less than cd's), and been awfully nice about getting them to the Internet (via Movielink or other distribution channels like NetFlix...) or just distributed generally. In addition, movies, even poor quality versions, take a very long time to download, even with a high speed connection.

And so therefore, piracy of movies shouldn't be much of a concern; rather,

the "...Study, from U.K-based Informa Media, concludes that, Hollywood and other film copyright owners have far more to gain through legal streaming, online subscription, e-tailing of discs and other legit downloads than they stand to lose.... But the sector's main advantage so far is speed and infrastructure (or lack thereof). Online film piracy will only reach the problem level that the music industry is suffering when most homes have super high-speed fiber optic connections, and that's not likely to be pervasive before 2020".

Not to mention, the study says the movie industry lost an estimated $92 million to online piracy last year, compared with $3.5 billion from hard copy piracy. (This may have something to do with their announcement to rescind the Oscar screener ban, mentioned earlier.)

So you know what that means. The Piracy Meter will have persuasive value until possibly 2020, when the last AOL subscriber has finally dumped them (they don't call 'em 'almost online' for nothin'). I love a good scale. What's two thumbs up? You're just sticking your fingers in the air. But sacrifice for art, that's got meaning.

Starting off, as mentioned before, Kill Bill = 1 star and Lost in Translation = 5 stars. But just so you know where I stand, looking over at the DVD collection, I'd also spend 36 hours, or 5 stars, on Tokyo Drifter, The Apartment, Bullitt, The Wild Bunch, American Beauty, Swept Away (the original), Reservoir Dogs, A Woman Under the Influence, Days of Heaven and Carnival of Souls. Oh, and La Dolce Vita. That one's worth at least 48 hours of sacrificed bandwidth.

Posted by Mary Hodder at October 23, 2003 12:17 AM