Movie Piracy

The subject of my paper focuses on movie piracy. Movie Piracy by definition is the illegal copying of movies for personal or commercial use. This is a new epidemic that is affecting the film industry financially on a global level. What are the necessary steps that can be taken on behalf of the film industry that can stop this illegal practice from occurring? Once you walk down the city streets of New York, you can easily find vendors selling their bootleg DVD copies of new released movies for half the price of a movie ticket. At the moment the quality of the movies aren't at its best, but with the technological advancements, the quality of these bootleg DVD's are getting better, which means that movie piracy is actually on the rise. This continues to worry both film studios and copyright activist. Movie companies are the ones suffering the most from this illegal practice. While they continue to produce $100 million movies, their profits continue to fall, when people decide to either pick up a burned copy or download the movie off some illegal Internet site. This essay takes a look at the different forms of movie piracy and what different organizations, such as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and its international counterpart, MPA (Motion Picture Association), are doing to combat this illegal practice.

There are many different forms of piracy and can all affect the movie industry in various ways. The most common type is known as "Optical Disc Piracy," which is a major threat to the movie industry. "Pirate optical discs, which include Laser Discs (LD), Video Compact Discs (VCD) and Digital Versatile Discs (DVD), are inexpensive to manufacture and easy to distribute. In 2000, over 20 million pirate optical discs were seized, and by comparison, 4.5 million videos were seized worldwide in the same period" (Anti-Piracy). Most of this bootleg movies are made through the common practice of recording the movie with a hand held camcorder in the theatres and then being copied or burned onto a VHS or DVD. Illegal copies of certain box office movies are also made from legitimate advance copies of these movies, which are used for screening and marketing purposes. For that reason, one cannot be mistaken into thinking that people in the streets commit most of the piracy. There was investigation done by AT&T and the University of Pennsylvania that proved that 80% of movie piracy is committed through industry insiders (Knight).

Another form of movie piracy is Internet piracy. By definition online motion picture piracy is "the unauthorized