Film piracy essay

What are the cons (for institution) and the pros (for audience) of digital film piracy?

Film piracy has existed for years. Copies of films could have been copied on to a disk after being filmed by a cheap camcorder in a cinema with lots of ambient noise and shaky camera work. People buying these films will have been ripped off as sometimes these films wouldn't even work properly. The people selling these films have been linked to other more serious crimes and therefore by buying these films you are effectively fuelling these crimes such as human or drug trafficking and even terrorism. The film industry spend a lot on adverts and posters to try and spread awareness of the fact that film piracy isn't a good thing. For instance in 2004 a 1.5 million pound campaign was launched to try and spread awareness of this very thing. This in the big picture isn't that much money to the film industry but on top of all the money they lose from people not buying their real DVDs and buying fake ones it is a blow to the industry. In the UK alone the estimated value of the pirated film market is said to be £950 million. The industry of film loses a lot via film piracy and while nowadays buying DVDs on the streets is a lot rarer there are still lots of ways films can be pirated. For instance nowadays people download the films off of the Internet for free and don't pay anything to the companies. Because the technology of recording devices is developing so quickly it is becoming harder to counter film piracy at the source as they are smaller and harder to detect. However if the file companies are able to stop people downloading and buying these pirated films then you could effectively stop it in a different way as there would be no point in pirating the film, however that would be hard to do because at the moment there isn't a bad thing the audience gets from it.

For the audience there doesn't seem to be a bad thing about film piracy, except possibly the fact that most of the money goes towards more serious crime. The audience get the films for free and don't need to even leave the house to download them. In some countries film and also music piracy is taken a lot more seriously. In these countries if you are caught downloading them illegally you are charged a lot of money and so in these countries less people download these films. However now there are even sites online where you can stream the films or tv programs so they are harder to trace back to the consumer and even harder to prosecute because they haven't actually done much wrong as in some cases the sites have been made to look legal to fool the consumer.

In conclusion the cons for institution are massive money losses and the pros for audience is little to no money loss,