Film\tv piracy unstoppable thanks to P2P

Film and TV piracy had once been rampant with illegal copies of DVD’s but lately there has been a surprising trend. On the streets of NewYork, illegal DVDs are virtually nowhere to be found. The Worldwide web and the Internet have made video piracy run rampant without any signs of slowing down. Besides pirated DVD copies of films, copies are also available online for illegal downloading, mainly through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

Now while there is plenty of people who download film and TV illegally every day, we have to stop and ask the real question is it really hurting the film and TV industry that much.  Supporters of the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.  But yet in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.” These figures come from the guys at Freakonomics showing that even though in a day where film and TV piracy is rampant it is still a very amateur operation and is not a professional group of people focused on getting everything for free.  No one expects to eliminate piracy. But given that a film’s opening weekend often accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the theatrical earnings, a few days’ delay in the availability of pirated copies can make a big financial difference. Can we really say that piracy is hurting the industry that bad and what they are not spending on buying that personal film or TV show they are buying other things? Also most of the online p2p sharing is not for a profit so no one else is making money off of most of the movies.

Can TV piracy be stopped, according to the NY times no, “STOPPING online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole. Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.” This again brings us back to P2P file sharing website there are possibly tens of millions of users.  Earlier this year, authorities finally won an injunction against the Pirate Bay, probably the largest and most famous Bit Torrent piracy site on the Web. The order blocked people from entering the site. To retaliate against the authorities the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers. So even when they did finally get some small victory against p2p, they just created hundreds more p2p sharing and made the problem even worse probably. And even studios' attempts at safeguarding their products against piracy, such as by encoding DVDs with digital watermarks that allow authorities to trace individual copies, aren't enough, Sandoval said. He said tech-savvy thieves have figured out how to strip such watermarks from DVDs.

"When you're talking about digital content ... it's impossible to lock it down completely" from theft, Sandoval said. "These hackers are very creative. Sometimes, they're one step ahead of the security experts." This just shows even if you try to stop pirates they always find a way to get around it and continue to share files freely.

Which brings me to the final point once again the NY timesprove the point about piracy. “Piracy won’t go away,” said Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, a site that reports on copyright and piracy news. “They’ve tried for years and they’ll keep on trying, but it won’t go away.” Mr. Van Der Sar said companies should stop trying to fight piracy and start experimenting with new ways to distribute content that is inevitably going to be pirated anyway. The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want. And with that statement I have to make my point that many people use peer to peer sharing sites and they are growing in strength and numbers every day. In my opinion they will never be able to stop it they might us well learn to embrace technology and make new forms of media that are less pirate able.

I have another supporting article here 

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