Film Piracy Case Study

Film Piracy, What is it? Australian Screen Association defines Film piracy as, “anyone viewing a full length movie via ‘unauthorised’ means, including: digital (downloading, streaming, digital transfer of pirated copies), physical (buying counterfeit/copied DVDs), and secondary (borrowing or viewing pirated copies).” Thanks to advancements in technology film piracy has been on the rise, making it easier to copy and distribute films worldwide with Australia being one of the highest contributors in the world to film piracy. This epidemic is having an affecting impact financially on Australian Film through economic consequences that the industry is now facing.

The world as we know it is a world full of Technology, where anyone who has access to the internet can either stream or share film conveniently and quickly. A consequence of all this new technology is that a lot of people have the ability to access it, which is the theft of copyrighted products by means of the internet. Based on information from a new study by IPOSOS and Oxford Economics ‘The Economic Consequences of Movie Piracy: Australia’,

“6,100 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) jobs were forgone across the entire economy (equivalent to more than six times the number of job cuts announced by Telstra in October 2010) including nearly 2,300 forgone directly by the movie industry and retailers. Allowing for effects on other industries, some A$1,370m in Gross Output (Sales) was lost across the entire Australian economy. Resulting in Tax losses of A$193m.”

This is money that the government could employ back into the economy for other social uses in areas such as education and health care. The key findings indicated the scale of harm caused by movie piracy to the Australian economy ...

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...racy being a worldwide epidemic in the year 2005.

The Australian screen industry contributes an estimated $5.3 billion to the Australian economy each year. The jobs of close to 50,000 Australians employed by the film and television industries could be threatened by piracy. The biggest threat to the Film Industry of today is Film Piracy as the impact of piracy on employment and the economy will persist as long as piracy persists.

Cara Cusumano, from Tribeca Film Festival, says that

“Mainstream movie distributors need to embrace online technologies rather than trying to avoid them. Piracy is less about people not wanting to pay and more about just wanting the immediacy - people saying, 'I want to watch Spiderman right now' and downloading it," she said.

"I think that if companies were willing to put that material out there, moving forward, consumers will follow."