{"id":48421,"date":"2009-11-25T14:48:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-25T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091125\/0215277080.shtml"},"modified":"2009-11-25T14:48:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-25T19:48:00","slug":"if-movie-piracy-is-really-a-problem-its-hollywoods-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/48421","title":{"rendered":"If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It’s Hollywood’s Fault"},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks in Hollywood have been working overtime lately trying to convince the world that piracy is harming the industry<\/a>, even as the industry is having its best year ever in terms of both money made and the number of movies released. It’s an uphill slog, so lobbyists, lawyers and execs from the various studios have resorted to what can only be described as “making stuff up.” But, like the poor corn farmers<\/a> that NBC Universal lawyers think are being hurt by movie piracy, most of these claims don’t pass the laugh test.<\/p>\n

But, of course, the story goes even deeper than that. As we’ve noted before, despite claims to the contrary, “piracy” is almost always an indicator of unmet consumer demand and a failure on the part of the industry to meet that demand. Matt Mason’s book<\/a> from last year made this quite clear, and now the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann has done a great job detailing how any “problems” that Hollywood might face from “piracy” are problems of its own making<\/a>. He points to the attempts by the major studios to block Redbox<\/a> and delay movie rentals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s the same thing we’ve seen over and over again. You don’t win customers by taking rights away from them. You win customers by adding more value. But that seems to be total anathema to Hollywood. Instead, it seems to think that the only way to run a business is to take away or disable rights and features from users, and then charge them to re-enable them. It’s not difficult to see why this is not just a recipe for failure, but one that will only drive more people to piracy, after the industry blocks them from getting what it seems perfectly reasonable to expect — and what the technology clearly allows.<\/p>\n

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The folks in Hollywood have been working overtime lately trying to convince the world that piracy is harming the industry, even as the industry is having its best year ever in terms of both money made and the number of movies released. It’s an uphill slog, so lobbyists, lawyers and execs from the various studios […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}