video

This profile looks at surveys about film and broadcast filesharing and online copying.

The profile is under construction: we'll be adding more information shortly.

Most of the world isn't on broadband (as we've noted in a discussion of Digital Divides, many people indeed aren't on the net or even the phone), so much illicit trading in feature films and other moving image content such as sports broadcasts involves videocassettes or disks, sometimes characterised as "canned bandwidth".

In 1999 the US Internet Industry Association accordingly commented that

The only "phantom menace" you’ll find on the internet today is the claim of widespread piracy of films. Hollywood has always reacted to new technologies with hysterical panic and predictions of lost revenue. But we challenge the film industry to show a single a nickel of loss due to Internet piracy. While it is technically possible to convert a film to a digital format that will play on a PC, the result would be a huge file that would take several days to download. And the end result would be a dark picture roughly two inches square. No one would seriously want to view a full-length feature film that way. You might get a college kid to do it, just to prove his abilities as a hacker. But then, college kids eat goldfish, too. That doesn’t mean that the world's entire fish population is in danger.

In response, some critics commented that download times on broadband might be as low as 30 minutes for a lower-quality image.

     some figures

A 2001 report by CyberDialogue (discussed here) claimed that 13% of US adults (11.6 million people) had downloaded movie trailers: most said they had downloaded fewer than five trailers in the three months prior to being polled.

Online US adults went to the cinema 22% more than the offline consumer; those who download trailers supposedly visited the big screen 93% more often. Downloading of a trailer from a film company's site is of course not illegal, so those figures do not present direct concerns.

Viant's 2001 The Copyright Crusade report (PDF) concluded that

on average, between 300,000 and 500,000 films per day were being transferred over Internet channels such as usenet, IRC, Gnutella, and FastTrack.

Its 2002 The Copyright Crusade II (PDF) suggested that much trading in illicit copies involves message services (with recordings often transferred as a DVD) and that

of nearly 10 million Internet seekers of "Star Wars" and "Spider-Man," approximately 2-3 million are, at the time of this writing, likely to have been successful in obtaining complete copies of either of these films

The Motion Picture Association of America claims that during 2000

• approximately 350,000 illegal videocassettes and 4,000 VCRs were seized in North America
• 17 million pirate optical discs were seized in the Asia-Pacific region
• 655,000 pirate videocassettes and over 171,000 pirate CD-ROMs containing films in MPEG4 format were seized in Russia
• piracy (including unauthorised exhibition in cinemas) costs studios over US$2.5 billion a year

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