Hurt Locker producers are gunning for pirates

[Jay A. Kelley]

Sorry.. Can't help you.. I'm done here.

 

[Rick Burnett]

Capitalism is a pretty straight forward method. If people don't want to pay $25 for a product, don't buy it. After awhile, the studios will have no choice but to lower the cost.

Unfortunately, with the internet, what has become unfair is me buying a bluray in NC at the same price as someone pays in NY is NOT fair. The cost of living is totally different, yet, these prices do not scale. $25 here is worth a lot more than $25 in NY.

That said, we joke about one of the movies we did, we figure if we see it show up as a torrent, then we made a good movie!

 

[Stephen Strangways]

Do people download films they would have otherwise purchased, therefore leading to a lost sale? Sure, it happens. But there are also people downloading films (or what not) that they would never have purchased anyway:

"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
http://slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/0937251/Estimating-Game-Piracy-More-Accurately

You really have to put things in perspective: if a film has been downloaded 10,000 times, have they lost 10,000 sales? No, they've lost maybe 1,000 sales, maybe less. Does that make it right? Hell no, but it puts the magnitude of the problem in perspective.

Jay, with all due respect (and I have great respect for you and how you've helped the RED community with your time and effort) your posts are scaring the hell out of me.

At NAB, you gave a friend of mine a free copy of your RED101 DVD. He suggested that I could come over and watch it with him. So, we could both be watching your DVD without paying for it. Are we stealing from you? Are we attacking and hurting your children?

If not, would it be any different if he had downloaded a torrent of it and we watched that instead?

(Dammit, I'm trying to argue pure logic here, but that makes me seem ungrateful somehow... so let me be sure to state on the personal side of things that my friend was very excited he got a DVD from you (wrote about it on his Facebook status, probably the only thing he "won" in Vegas!) and appreciative.

But my point is, in either case, you haven't lost a sale - he's a poor student, and I have a belief (arrogantly, I'm sure) that I probably already know almost everything that could be on the DVD, because I just spend way too many hours on REDuser.
So neither of us would have purchased it sight unseen. If we were forced to buy it to be able to watch it in the first place, it just wouldn't happen.

But something really interesting might happen... I might be blown away, and decide that the DVD is so good that I need to own it myself, so I can refer to it anytime I want (now, and many years later when the RED ONE is a quaint piece of history) and to have the pride of ownership of putting it on my shelf, and to say "thanks Jay, it's great, make another one sometime!" by voting with my dollars.

If people got free copies you happily handed out at NAB, I can't see the connection to why people getting free copies off torrents makes you want to murder them with their own testicles.

Again, I'm not saying copyright infringement is okay, I'm just saying that the response doesn't seem to be in fair proportion.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Jay has a dog in this fight, so his position is understandable.

I actually added "piracy" to the list of topics that cannot be discussed at my forum at Timescapes, along with "religion" and "politics". Threads like these always devolve into food fights, with lots of name calling and words like "thief" being thrown around.

 

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

That said, we joke about one of the movies we did, we figure if we see it show up as a torrent, then we made a good movie!

Yeah, you won't get pirated unless you're good. :thumbsup:

And if you're good... well... then you have nothing to worry about...

:beer:

 

[Roger Crouse]

I find it bordering on criminal activity to charge the current prices for a coke and a popcorn at a theater these days. It costs more than the dvd of the movie. They're killing themselves. Start a chain of 4k drive-ins and make a billion quick. It should be illegal to rip people off and not allow them to bring their own snacks and sodas. Maybe, if everyone stopped downloading pirated media the prices would come down? Yeah, like that would ever happen.:emote_popcorn:

 

[Rick Burnett]

I find it bordering on criminal activity to charge the current prices for a coke and a popcorn at a theater these days. It costs more than the dvd of the movie. They're killing themselves. Start a chain of 4k drive-ins and make a billion quick. It should be illegal to rip people off and not allow them to bring their own snacks and sodas. Maybe, if everyone stopped downloading pirated media the prices would come down? Yeah, like that would ever happen.:emote_popcorn:

While I DESPISE the cost of those products, I do actually understand why it is happening. EVERY person I know who owns and operates a theatre doesn't rake it in. With home theatres being so accessible, and the quality of many home theatres being so amazing, less and less people go out to the movies anymore.

Anyone who thinks the industry doesn't get it doesn't do a lot of reading, as they do get it, they are just being careful in their approach. While I think the length of time it has taken them to make decisions has been a bit long, I understand why.

Recently, I believe congress finally passed a bill that allows cable providers to block out your analog unsecured ports on your delivery device (ie, cablebox). They want this so they can now provide you movies before DVD/Bluray but after theatrical release. I believe part of this is to interject between things being available on things like netflix or redbox.

My feeling on it? Depends on the cost. Depends on the quality. I have netflix and RARELY use it now because most movie quality is crap. Their compression methods I really dislike.

It's funny, I am about to buy a PS3 because I want to see Book of Eli and Gamer at much higher quality because they are shot on the Red and NO other reason

It makes me mad that Bluray is more expensive than DVD. Which is why I will not rebuy ANY movie that I already own (and I own about 400 to 500 DVDs).

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Do people download films they would have otherwise purchased, therefore leading to a lost sale? Sure, it happens. But there are also people downloading films (or what not) that they would never have purchased anyway:

"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
http://slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/0937251/Estimating-Game-Piracy-More-Accurately

You really have to put things in perspective: if a film has been downloaded 10,000 times, have they lost 10,000 sales? No, they've lost maybe 1,000 sales, maybe less. Does that make it right? Hell no, but it puts the magnitude of the problem in perspective.

Jay, with all due respect (and I have great respect for you and how you've helped the RED community with your time and effort) your posts are scaring the hell out of me.

At NAB, you gave a friend of mine a free copy of your RED101 DVD. He suggested that I could come over and watch it with him. So, we could both be watching your DVD without paying for it. Are we stealing from you? Are we attacking and hurting your children?

If not, would it be any different if he had downloaded a torrent of it and we watched that instead?

(Dammit, I'm trying to argue pure logic here, but that makes me seem ungrateful somehow... so let me be sure to state on the personal side of things that my friend was very excited he got a DVD from you (wrote about it on his Facebook status, probably the only thing he "won" in Vegas!) and appreciative.

But my point is, in either case, you haven't lost a sale - he's a poor student, and I have a belief (arrogantly, I'm sure) that I probably already know almost everything that could be on the DVD, because I just spend way too many hours on REDuser.
So neither of us would have purchased it sight unseen. If we were forced to buy it to be able to watch it in the first place, it just wouldn't happen.

But something really interesting might happen... I might be blown away, and decide that the DVD is so good that I need to own it myself, so I can refer to it anytime I want (now, and many years later when the RED ONE is a quaint piece of history) and to have the pride of ownership of putting it on my shelf, and to say "thanks Jay, it's great, make another one sometime!" by voting with my dollars.

If people got free copies you happily handed out at NAB, I can't see the connection to why people getting free copies off torrents makes you want to murder them with their own testicles.

Again, I'm not saying copyright infringement is okay, I'm just saying that the response doesn't seem to be in fair proportion.

Damnit.. I swore I would not get into this...

Stephen, stealing is stealing.. Either you know right from wrong, or you don't. It all depends on your soul, and how you were raised.

Do you honestly think I would get upset, or consider you having stolen my property for watching my DVD with your friend?

How do you think I would feel if you downloaded the torrent?

Do you know the difference?

I'll bet $10,000 you do. Cause you're a good guy.

As was so correctly said: I have a dog in this fight.. So I am passionate about.

Companies overcharging for a product, is one arguement.
Taking something you do not own, without permission, is another matter entirely.

Trying to say "Well this has always been this way, so let's find a way to deal with it, and give people less incentive to steal from one another" is a horrible position to take.

I realize as a people, our ethics and morals have basically taken a dump on the front lawn of our race, but I refuse to accept this low standard as the status quo.

I say, do what's right, obey the law, respect other people's property, do to them as you would want done to you.

Then, and only then, will we be worth something as a people.

Wanna kill a company, don't buy it's products. It works, and it's legal.

I did not want to post any more, but you are a good guy, and i wanted to simply say, I have faith in people like you doing the right thing. So there is a difference, but I have no interest in anyone dowloading a torrent of my work. I have uploaded a number of "scenes" from my DVD and made a 3min commercial of it for the purposes of "getting people excited".

If someone takes something that I am selling without my permission, and they do it without paying for it, that is theft. Pure and simple.

Think about this: Blu-Rays are $22-$28 and people are bitching. My DVD cost $60... So I guess I'm really screwed.



Jay

 

[Robert Frank]

If someone takes something that I am selling without my permission, and they do it without paying for it, that is theft. Pure and simple.

You can rationalize taking something that doesn't belong to you all you want, but I agree with Jay.:iagree:


A little humor to help from OFFICE SPACE:

Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine compounds the interest is uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off. So we simplified the whole thing, we rounded them all down, drop the remainder into an account we opened.
Joanna: [Confused] So you're stealing?
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of money, right?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Joanna: Right. It's not yours?
Peter Gibbons: Well it becomes ours.
Joanna: How is that not stealing?
Peter Gibbons: [pauses] I don't think I'm explaining this very well.
Joanna: Okay.


OK now I'm really out! See ya!:auto:

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

I should never have posted anything....

Things are not the same. Music industry is suffering. Live performance is way up, not Recording and CD sales = a lot of very talented unemployed people (basically all those who don't/can't play live.)

a movie producer normally gets 50% of box office MINUS 30% of that to the distributor AFTER P&A has been deducted,(these figures are from Denmark). so you do the math....they rarely break even before going to dvd/blueray.

I will never understand why people from the industry can look them selves in the eyes and steal from their colleagues. this is my last post in this thread.

 

[Erik Franzén]

You can call it what you want. The wording of the law (which you seem keen on reminding us of) disagrees with you; it's copyright infringement. But you are free to call it what you want, as I am free to disagree with your definition of what constitutes a "theft".:sifone:

 

[Mark Collins]

Bingo. Instead of selling Blurays for $25, sell them for $5 and you will sell ten times as many. Do the math. It would also cut piracy dramatically.

Charging 25 bucks for a 50 cent plastic disc is nonsense.

Blu Ray discs are not 50 cents, not even close. Pricing it out it comes to about $3/disc. When you add in packaging, plus the amount of work that goes in to making the content for the disc, then it becomes easy to see why blu ray is still expensive.

Realistically, if you don't want to pay $35 for a BD, than just buy it the day it gets released. A lot of stores around me have been selling them for $20 on their release date and then back up to $35 the next day.

Granted you are still spending $20, but in my eyes the quality is far superior and worth it. My movie collection consists of films I know I will rent multiple, so I buy them instead and it saves me money in the long run.

Now, to the issue at hand, iTunes + zero content restrictions + cheaper digital download price + earlier release dates = success. At the end of the day you're still going to have pirating, but you still make more money than just DVD and Blu Ray alone.

The main reason I used to download movies is because I didn't want to wait for months to see a movie again after it left theatres. So, if they released them faster, then it would be a huge help.

 

[Alex G. Cohn]

You can rationalize taking something that doesn't belong to you all you want, but I agree with Jay.:iagree:

Who cares whether it is stealing or not?

It is illegal regardless of whether it is "stealing" or "infringement" or whatever... but being angry at the pirates is not making the problem go away... suing some of the pirates is not making the problem go away.

The studios have to use the technology to make piracy irrelevant.

In my opinion, the studios actually seem to be encouraging piracy right now with their tactics of raising prices and restricting peoples' usage of their legitimately purchased content.

People are happy to pay for content if it is convenient to access and the price is right.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I have to say this is why I have not created a downloadable version of my DVDs yet. The only way I feel protected is if I have a DRM on them, but they are so damn restrictive, that I don't like them. I know when I DL something with a DRM, it really pisses me off.

At least with a DVD, you can take it where you want, and show it where you want.

I like that

Jay

 

[Rick Burnett]

plus the amount of work that goes in to making the content for the disc, then it becomes easy to see why blu ray is still expensive.

No actually, I don't believe that. I don't see it as that much different than the effort for a DVD. I don't need all the other crap on the disk. I want just the movie.

For a modern release of a movie, I don't understand why the DVD is $12.99 I have seen where the Bluray was like $23.99. If anything, the DVD required an extra step to downconvert from 1080p or what have you.

 

[Steve G]

I find it bordering on criminal activity to charge the current prices for a coke and a popcorn at a theater these days. It costs more than the dvd of the movie. They're killing themselves. Start a chain of 4k drive-ins and make a billion quick. It should be illegal to rip people off and not allow them to bring their own snacks and sodas. Maybe, if everyone stopped downloading pirated media the prices would come down? Yeah, like that would ever happen.:emote_popcorn:

I suspect that without popcorn and coke sales, a lot of cinemas would close.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I suspect that without popcorn and coke sales, a lot of cinemas would close.

This is more true than you may know.. when I managed an AMC theatre back in the highschool days, 65% of the cinema's revenue was consession.

This is why the movie theatres HATE long films. But they used to LOVE intermissions.

Jay

 

[Milan Spasic]

The industry has failed consumers. Consumers have sought an alternative - in their eyes superior. Industry must adapt and find a way to have consumers WANT to pay.

+1.

Just like the war on terror, war on drugs and war on immigrants, the war on pirates and bit torrent users is pointless if you ignore the cause of the problem - the industry let the consumers down and frankly, raped them for years.

Those who adapt, embrace technology, don't rely on sales alone and find the revenues elsewhere will flourish.

 

[Jay Gannon]

I should never have posted anything....

Things are not the same. Music industry is suffering. Live performance is way up, not Recording and CD sales = a lot of very talented unemployed people (basically all those who don't/can't play live.)

a movie producer normally gets 50% of box office MINUS 30% of that to the distributor AFTER P&A has been deducted,(these figures are from Denmark). so you do the math....they rarely break even before going to dvd/blueray.

I will never understand why people from the industry can look them selves in the eyes and steal from their colleagues. this is my last post in this thread.

Your industry figures are way off for both music and movies.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

+1.

Just like the war on terror, war on drugs and war on immigrants, the war on pirates and bit torrent users is pointless if you ignore the cause of the problem - the industry let the consumers down and frankly, raped them for years.

Those who adapt, embrace technology, don't rely on sales alone and find the revenues elsewhere will flourish.

You think this is a war? This is not a war.. This is a bunch of snot nosed morons taking things that do not belong to them cause they don't want to pay for it. Pure and simple. No matter what companies do, they will find justification to continue to steal because that's what crooks do.

It's not their god-given right to watch someone else's creative material.

You see, it belongs to the creators. They made it, they paid for it, it's theirs. Not yours, not even close. They have chosen to sell it. I don't care if the price is $1 or $1,000 per DVD. It's theirs, they can charge what they want.

Now you seem to think that if the DVDs where cheaper, or if the companies "were fair" to the consumers, things would be different.

At this point you need to excuse me while I go off somewhere and laugh until I throw up (This is good for losing weight I hear).

People that justify an illegal act for their convience will do so because that's who they are. Not because they are pushed to do so. :frown2:

In other words, a scumbag that's willing to steal, will steal. There is no price cheaper than ZERO.

You have resentment against companies who control the marketplace, and tend to overcharge for their product in your eyes. That's cool, I can understand that. But how people go about "attacking" this problem is what separates the men from the boys.

You can not buy the product. Or you can do something like start your own company, give excellent product, and keep the prices where they should be. If you are successful, you will turn the industry on it's ear, and force pricing down across the board. You will be hated, and loved all at the same time.

Don't laugh.. This is exactly what Jim has done with RED.

And to my knowlege, he did not have to break the law to do it (At least, not a lot....

Jay