While the RIAA has long been suing those who illegally share music on P2P networks, the MPAA have given its statistics on the movie piracy rate and why it waited this long to start targeting end-users.
Until recently, MPAA said that the average movie takes about 12 to 18 hours to download from the Fast Track (Kazaa) network. However this is dropping to between 3 to 6 hours with newer P2P services. As a result, online movie piracy was not as bad as compared with other forms of movie piracy. While this download time still seems like a while, the MPAA are really getting worried about what may happen when the upcoming Internet technology takes effect which has demonstrated a full movie downloading in just 6 seconds (according to the MPAA).
At present, the MPAA determines that between 115,571 and 148,591 movies are transferred across P2P networks in the US every day. Each P2P client sharing content has an average of 10 infringing copyrighted movies. Each movie costs an average of $143 million to make and market and around 60% of movies do not recover their investment. To start off the lawsuit campaign, the MPAA will issue subpoenas to the ISPs on suspect IPs to get the user's details and subject the offenders to statutory damages of $30,000 to $150,000 per film.
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New MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman used the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television as a setting to warn illegal movie swappers in a move similar to that used by the recording industry, which began suing people earlier this year for sharing songs through peer-to-peer networks. "We'd rather pull people into theaters than drag them into court," said Glickman, who has been on the job for just two months. "We believe if we don't act now, the consequences will be devastating for the film industry." Big Bite Glickman said the MPAA would begin filing the lawsuits later this month "to prevent the wholesale looting of movies" and estimates that piracy is currently taking a annual bite of about $3.5 billion out of the movie industry revenues. The MPAA released statistics Thursday stating that the number of infringing movie titles traded daily in the U.S. through peer-to-peer services ranges from 115,571 to 148,591 and that the time it takes to download is quickly decreasing. Read the full article here. |
While the MPAA is anxious to try and stop online movie piracy, the problem they may not realise is that if the Internet does comes to the stage where it only takes several seconds to transfer a Gigabyte of data, lawsuits alone will be totally ineffective by then, just like the problem with online music piracy is starting to show.
For example, if one host makes an infringing file online, then in just one minute a potential of 10 hosts could have a copy (going by the demonstrated 6 seconds a transfer). Another minute later makes a potential of 100 hosts and finally another minute after that makes a potential of 1,000 hosts. This means that while at one moment there may only be one copy shared, one hour later there could be several thousand sharing a copy. Even if each user only stays online for several minutes per day, this will be ample time for viral like file transfers to take place.
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Source: E-commerce Times
