The last few movies I've gone to have had MPAA anti-piracy guilt trip spots running before the movie, which really bugs me that they are treating their paying patrons as pirates who download movies over the internet instead of buying movie tickets. I don't pirate movies off the internet, and don't intend to do so for several reasons. First, if a movie is any good, I'm going to want to see it on a bigger screen than my computer (watched tv and dvds on my computer while I was in college, but that was long enough), especially if it's a big budget action movie that really needs to be seen on a large screen. Second, there's no way of telling until you spend the time to download it whether it's a decent copy or a camera-in-the-theater crappy bootleg copy, and in the time it takes to download, I can go to Blockbuster and rent the DVD (it's a question of opportunity cost).
But, all that aside, the thing that really bugs me is that they are acting like all their lost money from piracy comes from internet downloading, when it really comes from pirated copies in countries like India, and especially China, which don't have strong copyright enforcement. China is a country of over a billion people, most of whom watch movies, but most of those movies are not legitimate copies. The MPAA's problem isn't internet downloads, it's China, but the American movie loving public is the ones that get the brunt of the blame and attack for the poor set painters and stuntmen getting hurt because of piracy. Not that they are actually getting hurt, because as long as movies are being made, they are going to get paid.
Oh yeah, tonight I watched two pirated DVDs that the family I was babysitting for owned. They didn't pirate them off the internet. They got them from China.
Posted by kathryn at Noviembre 7, 2003 10:35 PM | TrackBack