Beating A Dead Horse: The MPAA Statistic
Today I read an article about the Jhannet Sejas/ Regal Cinemas case that was published on August 2nd. It's kind of crazy. The story in a nutshell: a girl recorded a 20 second clip of the new Transformers movie on her camera to show her little brother, and is now facing up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. I have signed on to the boycott against Regal Cinemas unless they drop all charges.
Anyway, I noticed a statistic in the story that drives me batshit crazy every time I read it: The worldwide motion picture industry lost $18 billion in 2005 as a result of piracy.
It's a very fishy statistic. For starters, that oft-quoted statistic encompasses the losses of "the worldwide motion picture industry, including foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators."
According to the MPAA's own document, "the major motion picture studios represented by the MPAA" only lost $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005, a more accurate number since we're talking about a major motion picture shown in a nationwide theatre chain. But as for the US, it breaks down even further. Even the MPAA claims that US losses add up to only $1.3 billion, an even more appropriate number, as the crime was committed in the US and US law applies.
But I think that number may still be way too high. The MPAA calculates these losses not on any scientific study or research. They cite their source for these numbers only as this:
Piracy loss calculations are based on the number of legitimate movies – movie tickets and legitimate DVDs – consumers would have purchased if pirated versions were not available.
How can they calculate this number? Well, they can't. It's barely possible to count the number of people who have downloaded any given movie from a pirate site, and even then there are almost always multiple copies of the same movie available, and the numbers of downloaders shift from minute to minute.
Even still, let's say hypothetically you could count every illegal download and every illegal hard copy DVD sold. (You can't and they haven't.) It's quite a leap to go from that number to assume that each illegal download and sale is a loss for the companies. Not everyone that downloaded any given movie would have paid to see the film in question if a pirated version was available.
The essence of what I'm saying is this: the $18 billion figure so often quoted in the press is dreadfully misleading and wholly inaccurate - not because of bad science or lousy research, but because it is entirely made up.
