Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Download This Post!

I don't download music or movies on the internet. I never really have, but I've never really understood the entertainment industry's hardline stance on it, which mainly meant they were suing their own customers. And they blamed any dip in sales on downloads instead of trying to incorporate the internet into their business model or maybe realizing they've been putting out substandard fare. The MPAA used to claim television was gonna kill the movie industry as well, a now absurd claim.

And the reason I don't believe anything the MPAA says is because of things like this:
The MPAA has said that college students account for more than 40% of the movie industry's losses due to piracy. This week, the Associated Press reported that the association's math was wrong.

The MPAA now says that college student account for about 15% of illegal downloads and the group attributed the higher figure to human error. The MPAA is one of two groups to blame college students for increases in piracy and loss of revenue. The Recording Industry Association of America also has targeted college campuses, claiming they are responsible for much of the peer-to-peer file-sharing that has cut into profits for record companies and artists.

15% is still significant, but I don't even believe that number either. Particularly since "human error" lead to that number more than doubling in their original estimate. Here's a tip to future lobbying efforts: don't lie to us. Credibility, once lost, is difficult to ever regain. Something about crying wolf.

How come music and movies are the only two industries LOSING money on the internet? Doesn't that say more about their business models than the evil consumers ruining their bottom lines?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like this quote from Mark Luker, VP of some IT group called Educause: “it doesn’t account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren’t necessarily using college networks...3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks,”

Whatever the real number is, these losses are in NO WAY due to studios constantly remaking old TV shows and movies that were popular in the 70s instead of actually putting out a newly-written movie.