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Piracy apologists love to pull out the Robin Hood card in order to justify their theft. After all who cares about all those rich people in Hollywood right? Wrong….a fact which the MPAA’s Chris Dodd pointed out in piece published in Variety this week:
Two million people get up every morning in all 50 states to go to work in good-paying jobs. Few will ever walk a red carpet, but their jobs are in jeopardy because of piracy.
When we talk about stolen property like pirated films or shows, I think the assumption is these are wealthy people, so what difference does it make if I steal from them? There’s not an understanding that 96% are hard-working, middle-income families paying mortgages and trying to educate their kids.
Like any other industry, the American film industry depends on its worker bees to make its products. In turn, those workers depend on a healthy film industry for their paychecks.
In fact, one of the reasons Hollywood became such a successful cog in the U.S. economy was because the studio system that emerged in the early part of the 20th century was really a factory system modeled after Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line. In Hollywood’s studio system, each worker played a specific role in the film production (or manufacturing) process.
At their peak, Hollywood studios were producing hundreds of movies each year. Last year, the six major studios produced only 120 movies. Contrast that with the 204 produced in 2006. Fewer films means fewer jobs on the production line for Hollywood’s 96%.
Looking back, it’s also worth noting that a thriving movie industry allowed some of the greatest American movies of all time to be made. As noted in Wikipedia:
Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many films being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description.
The more income studio’s generate, the more chances they can take to finance less mainstream movies. When losses due to online piracy undermine the industry, it also undermines the diversity of choices that movie lovers appreciate. In lieu of funding less mainstream fare, studios stick with formulaic flicks that generate big bucks opening weekend (before piracy can dilute audiences). The sad thing is that we won’t know what we’re missing because it’s not made. In the future films like Citizen Kane may never see the light of day.
Of course, new ways of producing and distributing films online are taking hold, but even the new guard is suffering from the scourge of online piracy. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a recent letter to shareholders, “Piracy continues to be one of our biggest competitors.” He pointed to Popcorn Time, a platform that makes viewing pirated films as easy as watching one on Netflix as evidence of the damage being done.
Online piracy not only diminishes livelihoods, but consumer choices and unless we can limit the losses, the picture will only grow dimmer. In the end, we may well be left with only cute cat videos on YouTube to entertain us. Piracy hurts everyone.