60 Minutes - Lesley Stahl Segment on Movie Piracy
gerry
exhibit one would be the segment on movie piracy that Lesley Stahl
presented this Sunday. Somehow, the 60 Minutes crew and police found
a place in Los Angeles that still makes bootleg copies of DVDs, if
this clip was not file footage recorded a year ago.
Nowhere in this story about the movie piracy problem was there any
mention of the series of big budget bombs Hollywood is releasing these
days, movies like Amelia, Land of the Lost, Surrogates (a good movie
but weak box office) and Confessions of A Shopaholic.
Instead, you had a talking head link the homicidal Mexican drug gang
Zetas to selling bootleg DVDs. And there was one Hispanic shown, a
poor guy caught videotaping a movie in a theater going to criminal
court with his wife and small child. What's the matter, the movie
theater police scared of arresting Zeta gang members because they have
automatic weapons?
Stahl's hero in this story is Sarkozy's French government, which is
threatening to cut the Internet service of repeat down loaders of
bootleg movies. The same French government that previously targeted
Hollywood movies for threatening French culture, and tried to limit
the showing of non-French made movies in France.
Nowhere in this segment did Stahl mention how there has been a sharp
drop in DVD movie sales, in part caused by the economy, in part caused
by the proliferation of Red Box kiosks, pay per view cable movies and
NetFlix rentals. Hollywood studios now make most of their money from
DVD sales and, to a lesser extent, the overseas box office. The
recession hurts US DVD sales and bad movies like Amelia don't travel
well to foreign markets. But that DVD sales decline is why Hollywood
studios are firing many of their top executives to save salary costs
by reducing headcount.
Movie piracy has nothing to do with Hollywood's current troubles. Bad
movies are the real problem, movies no one wants to watch. Taken was
a big box office hit even though this movie was out on DVD overseas
months before its USA release thanks to a delay in Taken finally
getting a PG-13 rating after editing out some violence.
The 60 Minutes story ignored the real change going on, that the most
popular products from Hollywood are US TV series like Smallville,
Supernatural and Lost. Viewers in countries like Australia want to
see the current US TV series episodes now, not wait a year for their
release overseas. And viewers in the USA, who miss a TV series
episode broadcast or who now have bad TV reception on some ATSC
channels and don't have cable, download these TV series' episodes from
the Internet, commercials edited out. That is a big change from just
three years ago. A change 60 Minutes totally ignored.
Along with who knows what else.
RichA
Agreed. I used to religiously buy laserdiscs and then DVD's. I sold
the laserdiscs long ago, but I had over $10k worth. I've got over 900
DVD's but I haven't bought a movie (I still rent) in months. None of
them seem worth owning.
nick
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People buying those crappy camcord bootlegs wouldn't be paying to see
those movies in a theater anyway. It's a different audience and a
different demographic. More problematic around here is the
proliferation of duped pre-release DVDs, duped screeners, DVD-quality
level unreleased pictures, and so on, which, at least speaking
locally, cause more damage than those jokey camcord things (why rent
something from Blockbuster or Hollywood when you can buy it for three
dollars from your local bootleg dealer?). But that wasn't talked
about in the 60 Minutes piece. It was that fool Mexican running an
entire operation out of his home, DIY-ing the whole thing. (Cue go
Lesley Stahl's shocked gasps as she finds out that some of these
pirates even take their children to the movies with them when they're
committing their crimes.)
And then you get Steven Soderbergh self-righteously going on about how
The Matrix wouldn't be made today because, because . . . um, something
to do with piracy meaning the studios don't have the money to invest
in riskly projects or something. I wasn't quite sure why they
wouldn't make The Matrix today. Something to do with those drug
cartels and that Mexican guy.
sirblob2
fuck em
here's an idea, why doesnt the audience patent itself as intellectual
property. that way these nerds wont be able to scare them.
and cbs, of course, part of a tv world desiring the internet blackout
they've been out for the last decade and might even get it done in the
next two decades... while their shares plummet, the little fuckers,
they sure didnt care when they wrecked cinemas and drive ins.
nazi sarkozy's brutally fucked up violation of privacy and of a pc
program over a judge's ruling was ruled out by the high senate, not to
mention no one at brussells allowed it. but by god they are to be
feared with the amount of old world power they handle.