Who gets affected by film piracy?

(introductory project essay)

Film piracy is an issue that has been on-going and continuously growing for years. The situation has spread so widely now that it is affecting the economy, social groups and the film industry that actually create the film. Completely stopping film piracy is out of the question as there are hundreds of websites that get used constantly every day. The only thing we can do is to reduce film piracy to achieve the perfect balance between the number of sites in use and the film industry losing money. The main groups of people that get affected by the use of film piracy are: cinemas, film directors, and the general public.

Cinemas are hugely affected by film piracy as they are effectively ‘the middle man’ in the issue. They don’t create the movies that the public download; they just show them to earn revenue for their company. They are losing money because the public are ‘file sharing’ the movies instead of paying money to watch them. This loss of profit then causes the cinema to increase their prices. With the prices of tickets to see films getting more expensive, the public are then less likely to buy the more expensive tickets. This then causes less successful business for the company which leads to producing anti-piracy adverts in the beginning of films and producing posters to place on bus stops, lamp posts and bill boards. In the UK, film distributors are rewarding cinema staff for finding people who are illegally copying that film for piracy websites. Recently, thirteen cinema ushers across the UK have been given cash rewards of up to £700 for their findings of film pirates. The outcome of the twelve incidents included arrests, cautions and exclusion orders. The generous rewards were funded by the film distributors’ organisation. By seeing this, cinema staff will be more likely to make more of an effort to crack down on the amount of film piracy in cinemas.

Directors, screen writers, actors and actresses are another large group of people that get affected by film piracy. They are the ones who put the effort and money into creating the film just to be downloaded for free from a film piracy website. Although it may seem like they are the ones who suffer the most from this issue, they do make millions from the profits generated by the sales of the DVDs and cinema tickets.  Film piracy is subtracting a large amount from the directors, screen writers etc. however, they still have millions transferred to their bank accounts. (Depending on the popularity of the film) Kevin spacey is a man who fits most of the categories of the film industry. He is a director, screenwriter and actor. Spacey was interviewed to determine his personal perspective and ideas for film piracy. He thought ‘people will always go to the cinema for the experience.’ On the other hand a majority of the public will always strive to feel the satisfaction of getting something for free. He also states that it is important to make sure that cinema is always used more than film piracy sites. As a director, screenwriter etc, film piracy is a big deal for a man like spacey, he is passionate about the experience of seeing the movie as much as he is about making them. I personally agree with his ideas, I think that people don’t think as much about the people who have put a lot of effort into making the movie which is very important as they are the people who make the thing that film pirates steal.

Social groups are the people in which are committing the -what seems like- fake crime.  58% of the down-loaders world-wide are 16-24 year old. This age group is predicted the most popular to be illegally downloading as this is the age group that is at the right age to find the piracy websites. Most of them will be is full time education and so will be on computers frequently. The people of this age group may follow a particular popular person who is deemed ‘cool.’ Therefore if that person were to illegally watch films then the other people will want to be like them. This means resulting in multiple people watching films illegally, so the trend spreads, making it almost impossible to stop everyone from doing it. Some people who are knowledgeable of computers create the websites themselves. The main reason for this is to gain popularity from people on the internet or people they see every day.

In conclusion, I think that not everyone understands the broad range of people that film piracy affects. This may be because they do not think deep enough of the consequences of film piracy; they think it is free and harmless when in reality it betrays those who worked hard to make the film, actors and actresses. The public don’t even realise that they are the reason as to why the cinema are rising their prices which then the public moan at when it was them in the first place. I think that there needs to be a clearer understanding of the effect of film piracy to the public in order to reduce the issue further.