Today, I went to see GI Joe, currently 39% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. As The Times’ review says, “It’s not entirely without merit—any film that shows the Eiffel Tower crumbling like a stale croissant can’t be all bad.” And, Roger Ebert sagely notes, “it is better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”. Also, it has the best homage to the Star Wars Death Star X-wing/TIE-figher scenes that I’ve seen.
But that’s beside the point. I saw signs at the cinema from the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation, rhetorically asking “What are you really burning?”. Personally, as I have said before, I find this far more palatable than previous ads.
What really piqued my interest was IPAF’s suggested dinner party conversations (PDF, available from the About IPAF page):
Want to talk to friends, family and strangers about film piracy in an engaging way? Here’s how: The following two conversations each begin with an anecdotal story about a popular film, and then provide a supportive argument that explains how movie piracy has negative consequences. The best way to conclude these conversations is with an account of what is being done about piracy, and how everyone can play at [sic] active part.
Sadly, the conclusion isn’t a discussion about how everyone can play an active part in unauthorised reproduction and distribution of movies.
The suggested conclusion includes this point:
The industry has no intention of preaching to anyone, nor to point the finger and apportion blame—they simply want to engage and educate people to the value of copyright and its role and value in society so everyone can make an informed choice.
No intention of preaching to anyone? Presumably “the industry” has had a significant change of heart since much-mocked (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4; see also 5) the “you wouldn’t steal a car” ad (which, by the way, remains on DVDs that I legally bought—I guess the feeling of being preached at every time I watch them is just an unintended side effect).
There are also some statements that seem odd. For example:
Research has identified that apathy is the biggest issue for the film & TV industry—for many Australians film piracy is not even on the radar. For the industry to survive and continue to produce a variety of quality shows, we need to shift the mentality of what is right or wrong when it comes to accessing film & television content. Just because it’s entertainment, doesn’t mean everyone has an irrefutable right to access it whenever and however they want.
Presumably this is just poorly worded, but I suspect that many Australians are, in fact, well aware of movie piracy, and proceed with it regardless. The fact that IPAF is encouraging me to speak about movie piracy at dinner parties means that it’s sufficiently “on the radar” for a substantial portion of the Australian population. AFACT’s proceeding against iiNet also suggests this is “on the radar”. I think there are two issues. First, what value do consumers put on the product: not every download is a lost sale. (Personally, I was struggling to justify valuing seeing GI Joe at $16; but, hey, explosions.) Secondly, it is an issue of convenience: when you’re waiting months for DVDs to be released and years for TV shows to be broadcast in Australia, Mininova (to use the site named in the IPAF document) is an appealing option.
The first conversation that IPAF suggests be used at dinner parties is based around Kenny:
The Australian film “Kenny” was the country’s highest grossing box office hit in 2006; But imagine how Clayton Jacobson, the film’s Writer and Director, felt when he found friends and family had freely admitted to watching or owning illegal copies of the film months before the official DVD was released. When asked by Jacobson why they did it, his friends replied: “Well, I went to the cinema and it did really well, so you got my dollar there so I thought it would be okay to burn it?”
On the face of it, the film earned a cool A$7.5 million at the local box office. That might sound like a lot. However, after the earnings were split up and divided between the investors, cinemas, distributors, advertisers and promoters of the film, the director came away with about $125,000. Split over the three years it took to make the movie, that’s an average of $42,000 per year. Ironically, Jacobson says that he could have earned more money, and a more regular wage cleaning toilets over the same period.
Except, however, that people did buy the DVD. Sadly, hard data on DVD sales in Australia (and, for that matter, elsewhere) are hard to come by. But Screen Australia has an analysis of the video industry in Australia, which reads, in part:
To find out what Australian titles earnt in 2007, the Australian Film Commission analysed data from GfK Retail and Technology Australia on the top 1,000 titles overall by value of retail sales (the 1,000 titles represented three per cent of titles but 51 per cent of total sales revenue).
According to these calculations, 8.5 per cent of the revenue from these top 1,000 titles came from Australian productions, equating to $52 million, up from $40.3 million in 2006. The biggest contributors were Happy Feet, Summer Heights High and Kenny.
In 2006, Kenny was the highest-selling Australian DVD movie and seventh-highest selling DVD title in Australia overall: ahead of, for example, High School Musical and Batman Begins. (Which is reasonably impressive, since it was only released on 7 December 2006.) In 2007, it was the second-highest selling Australian DVD and in 2008, the “special edition” was the seventh-highest selling Australian DVD.
It could just be me, but I think the actual Kenny DVD sales ought to have been mentioned when the suggestion is that the writer and producer only got paid from the cinema box office because people with presumably poor quality pirated copies didn’t by legitimate, authorised DVDs.
One hopes that, though this is IPAF’s first suggested dinner party conversation, it isn’t the best argument they have.
