Two recent news stories got me thinking about the entertainment industry’s on-going battle to crack down on illegal downloading. Today Yahoo! reported that a Minnesota mother was fined $1.5 million for downloading just 24 songs illegally (read the article here). And a few days ago, The Hollywood Reporter mentioned a recent settlement in which watch-movies.net will pay major studios $2.2 million as a penalty for enabling users to watch movies and TV shows online illegally. These two cases make it clear that illegal downloading is an issue that encompasses music, television, and film. But rather than work towards some kind of resolution, the major studios and companies just continue to throw money at the problem by suing the pants off anybody they can catch. Downloading albums, TV episodes, and entire movies illegally are all a bit different from one another, however. Here’s how:
When the topic of illegal music downloading comes up, we think of course of programs like Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire. There’s always a new program that music companies are trying desperately to shut down. And of course, every time they successfully bring one down, another new program sprouts up. It’s an on-going, never-ending battle. Hundreds of articles, papers, and reports have been written about this subject so we all know the situation. Rather than re-write one of those articles, I’ll try to briefly summarize the argument for supporting free music downloading in three bullet points:
-Million-dollar lawsuits will never put an end to illegal file-sharing or the programs that enable it
-Musicians make more money off of live shows and merchandise than they do selling CDs and tracks
-If consumers discovers a new band through listening to a few illegally downloaded songs, they’ll likely end up spending money on full albums, live concerts, and merchandise
There’s obviously a lot more to this issue, but those are the basic points. I feel like you can make a similar argument for watching TV episodes online. Lots of people, including myself, watch online because they are trying to catch up to the most currently aired episode. Once they finally catch up, they’ll become a regular viewer and could end up buying DVD sets of each season. For example, recently I decided I’d try watching a few episodes of Community to see if I liked the show. I did, and now I’m scrambling to catch up to the second season that airs every week. If I wasn’t able to find the old episodes so easily online, I probably wouldn’t have got into the show. I certainly wouldn’t have spent the money on DVDs before I’d even seen the show, and watching multiple seasons of a show through my one-DVD-at-a-time Netflix subscription is just painful.
The television industry seems to making more headway than the music industry, because they’ve begun to embrace the idea of viewers watching shows online for free. Hulu has most of today’s popular shows, and many channels like ABC and Fox put episodes of their current shows on their own websites. This is definitely a step in the right direction, but all of the episodes need to be on there, not just the season airing now. And exclusive DVD bonus material would act as incentives for consumers to buy DVD sets rather than only watch past seasons online.
Finally, there’s watching movies online and downloading them illegally. Maybe I’m biased about this subject in particular because I myself am a filmmaker. One day, it could be my hard work that is being downloaded illegally online. But despite my own circumstances, I feel like movies are just a different ballgame. Unlike music and TV, watching a film online for free usually wont persuade you to go out and buy more movies and merchandise. If you really love the movie, you might go out and buy the DVD, but most people who download movies watch them once and leave it at that. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that I’m flat out against downloading and watching movies for free online.
Now if only my industry could come up with a better anti-piracy campaign than this:
