Shocklee points us to an odd, totally unsubstantiated article by a University of Southern Illinois professor insisting that “piracy” is creating tremendous harm to West African content industries. This goes against numerous studies, including those by the WTO on how developing nations often should have less stringent intellectual property laws while they’re developing. The article is based on some simple conjectures: that even with low budgets, films made in Nigeria are having trouble making money and it’s all the fault of piracy — first from lost sales, but also because people are pirating high budget American films as well. Basically, the argument is that if people can get those high budget films at the same “pirated” cost as local films, of course they’ll go for the high budget films, and thus destroy the local film industry.
Of course, that assumes that in the absence of “piracy” prices to see foreign films or to buy their DVDs scale relative to their budget. That’s simply not true. Movie tickets and DVD prices do not scale based on the budget of the movie. The professor doesn’t seem to mention the fact that most films (especially the low budget kind) struggle to make money in the first place. He just assumes that it’s because of piracy. He neglects to mention that there are plenty of business models beyond selling DVDs. He does mention that people seem to prefer local content, but then ignores that in his very next sentence, saying that local content “can’t compete.” Even though he just said that the market demands local content.
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