Film Industry Economic Losses Mount From Continuing World Wide Piracy

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 30, 2:18PM EDT · Published Dec 27, 8:35PM EST

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First-run movie DVDs of films made by US studios are sold be vendors on the streets within a few miles of the central offices of the People’s Republic in Beijing. The Motion Picture Association of America says it lost $244 million because of piracy in China in 2005, the most recent year for which the association has comprehensive figures. The cost of piracy reported in the MPAA survey was $1.3 billion for the same year in America. The US legal system’s protection for intellectual property rights does not work for the film industry because most people have chosen moral relativism with regard to the theft of movies. These people, which includes many in the US, use file-sharing and other methods to steal premium content and use it for free.

The piracy problem has continued to worsen over the last several years, despite pressure from industry associations and legal authorities. There were almost 11 million illegal downloads of “Star Trek” this year, making it the most stolen movie of 2009, according to TorrentFreak.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, “Hangover”, “District 9”, and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” also made the top 10 list which had among them a total of 85 million illegal downloads this year. Multiplied times $9 a ticket price and the amount becomes a substantial portion of the total revenue that some studios bring in.

The motion picture industry has spent millions of dollars trying to curb piracy. Almost every major nation has digital piracy laws, but content piracy is like the drug trade and shop-lifting. Content owners are in a fight which they can never completely win. There are simply too many people who believe that whatever they see is theirs to keep or theirs to use and have chosen to ignore the economic hardship this causes the creative community.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.