MPAA: Piracy Costs 140k Jobs Per Year → Re: I agree

The lack of knowledge about how big business works, what it requires to make a Hollywood movie, amount of financing it takes to fund the manufacturing and distribution combined with the total lack of respect for capitalism is astounding.

Anyone here who complains about actors making too much or crying about how bad the movies are clearly has no understanding about supply and demand.

If you think the movies are bad, then I guess you shouldn't be wasting all of your oh-so-precious time downloading it illegally either.

Hypocrites.

I worked in the business and I can tell you, firsthand, that most of the stuff coming out is not worth the film stock it is on.

Hollywood has gone from making good movies to trying to make money off of formulas and has been for quite a while.

And before you bring it up, I don't download anything illegally. I have enough friends with Neflix or who buy the DVD's themselves that I can borrow them and see if the movie is worth it. Plus, I will buy certain ones I like.

I know the costs associated with making movies but I also know that most studios bank on a "name" to bring them into the theater rather than the story. Explain "The Blair Witch Project" which made millions. Explain "Last Action Hero" and "Ishtar" which both had big names and BOMBED.

So according to you, anyone who questions this biased "study" must be someone who is downloading illegally? What kind of logic is that?

There are some people who present high prices or low quality as an excuse for copyright infringement. But others are merely suggesting that there are other possible causes for the alleged "losses" which the cartel questionably attributes to piracy. (There is *some* loss to piracy, but it turns out to be a lot less than claimed when the biased methodology is exposed.)

Even in regard to the "hypocrites" as you call them, it's not an either/or dichotomy where a movie must be either worth full price or not desirable at all. In reality, there are often mismatches between asking and offering price, and this is a very common reason for piracy.

For example, smuggling appears whenever taxes artificially inflate the price of a product (cigarettes across borders for example). The situation of the entertainment industry is like this in principle. The artificial monopoly privilege introduced by copyright law in its current form distorts the market and piracy naturally appears to fill the gaps created.

Watch for fallacies of your own before lecturing about economics.