Internet Piracy and Movies :: Internet Piracy Movies

Introduction The growth of the Internet has led to many new innovations in the way it is used. At first, it was just a form of text-based communication, similar to mail except faster. Then, as connections became quicker, people started to browse web pages, and soon even children could have their own space on the Internet. Today, many people around the world have broadband, which transfers text and pictures much faster than users can read. So developers created programs to use this extra bandwidth, programs that utilized the widespread nature of the Internet. The first peer-to-peer software can arguably be Napster, which let users download songs from other users. Napster restricted its files to songs since most people still had 56k connections at that time, so larger files would take an unreasonably long time. Presently, broadband connections are relatively inexpensive, so full movies can be downloaded in almost the time it takes to watch them. This widespread availability of high bandwidth has led to new applications, such as Limewire, Kazaa, and Morpheus, which let the user download any type of file, the most controversial of which is movies. Compared to Napster, these new applications have more decentralized architectures, making the legal battle against them harder to prove. Companies are no longer directing where the users download from – the individual applications are. Users are finding movies from their own computer, and since companies have no personal hand in this search, the film industry now has to target individual users in order to stop them from downloading. Views On Internet Piracy Movie Industry’s View Movie piracy quickly became a problem for the film industry, because the average major studio film costs $55 million to produce and $27 million more to advertise, much higher than other forms of media2. This investment is usually not returned in its initial showing in the movie theatres, so the film is then released to home video. After a year or two have passed, a television channel pays the copyright fee to broadcast it. Also, markets internationally are supposed to go through the same steps. Since the filmmakers get these various forms of copyright fees, many people think that most movies make their money back, but in actuality the Motion Picture Association of America states â€Å"four out of ten movies never recoup the original investment2â€Å".