What do directors think when people make a torrent for their movie?
9 Answers
If people torrent your movie, that's a good sign. It's free advertising and can lead to more people paying for your movie. The majority of pirates wouldn't watch your movie at all if they couldn't get it for free, so you're not losing much actual revenue. What you're gaining is the potential for the pirate to recommend your movie to someone else, or even better, go out and see it in the theater with some friends or sit through the commercials when it makes it to TV. There's evidence that, at least with music, pirates are more likely to pay for music than regular users, not less. I suspect this is true of movies as well.
So if I find someone has torrented my movies I'm pretty happy about it. The thing I worry about is if someone claims my work as their own (which has happened) or makes an unauthorized profit off of it. If it's free for all, I support the pirates.
But the question is backwards. For the most part, pirates pirate because it's easier than going through proper channels. If I have the choice between torrenting a movie or going out to the dvd store and renting it, which were your only choices for years, it's a nobrainer. You pirate the thing. But with Netflix and other streaming services, the need to pirate has diminished because it's now easier to sit on your sofa and click to the movie with your remote (assuming the movie is on Netflix).
(And yes, I'm a real filmmaker making real movies in Hollywood.)
So if I find someone has torrented my movies I'm pretty happy about it. The thing I worry about is if someone claims my work as their own (which has happened) or makes an unauthorized profit off of it. If it's free for all, I support the pirates.
But the question is backwards. For the most part, pirates pirate because it's easier than going through proper channels. If I have the choice between torrenting a movie or going out to the dvd store and renting it, which were your only choices for years, it's a nobrainer. You pirate the thing. But with Netflix and other streaming services, the need to pirate has diminished because it's now easier to sit on your sofa and click to the movie with your remote (assuming the movie is on Netflix).
(And yes, I'm a real filmmaker making real movies in Hollywood.)
Not a director, so this is speculation from an outsider.
I'm mostly aware of software piracy and if the same principles apply, often it doesn't actually matter if someone downloads your software/game/movie off a torrent. This is because a lot of people, who torrent, would never actually buy the thing they are downloading. This might be because they are poor, or not particularly interested in your product but will torrent them just because they can. What this means is that there those individuals are not actually lost sales because they wouldn't have bought it in the first place. As James H. Kelly says it might be quite appropriate to treat this as free advertisement as if your content becomes popular as a torrent, it means people like your content and will talk about it to their friends. Their friends are most likely not torrenters and thus you get free advertising. I remember a blog post by a software engineer who released an application and shortly afterwards a cracked torrent of it ended up on The Pirate Bay (one of the more well known torrent sites). He tracked the sales of his application and for the first several months he had only a few sales. But once a torrent of his application went up and became popular, sales rose dramatically, showing that the piracy in fact helped in the marketing of his application. I can't find the article at the moment. I found it browsing through Hacker News, I'm not even sure when it was published. If someone here knows of it, please let me know.
The main cause for worry for a director in online piracy seems to be that piracy hurts the movie business, but I have recently come across the idea that this may not be the case. I want to reference a few articles here. http://www.forbes.com/sit
The second article - http://www.freakonomics.c
Also this - http://www.cato-at-libert
I am keeping it short for the sake of brevity but reading the original articles would be quite informative.
I'm mostly aware of software piracy and if the same principles apply, often it doesn't actually matter if someone downloads your software/game/movie off a torrent. This is because a lot of people, who torrent, would never actually buy the thing they are downloading. This might be because they are poor, or not particularly interested in your product but will torrent them just because they can. What this means is that there those individuals are not actually lost sales because they wouldn't have bought it in the first place. As James H. Kelly says it might be quite appropriate to treat this as free advertisement as if your content becomes popular as a torrent, it means people like your content and will talk about it to their friends. Their friends are most likely not torrenters and thus you get free advertising. I remember a blog post by a software engineer who released an application and shortly afterwards a cracked torrent of it ended up on The Pirate Bay (one of the more well known torrent sites). He tracked the sales of his application and for the first several months he had only a few sales. But once a torrent of his application went up and became popular, sales rose dramatically, showing that the piracy in fact helped in the marketing of his application. I can't find the article at the moment. I found it browsing through Hacker News, I'm not even sure when it was published. If someone here knows of it, please let me know.
The main cause for worry for a director in online piracy seems to be that piracy hurts the movie business, but I have recently come across the idea that this may not be the case. I want to reference a few articles here. http://www.forbes.com/sit
Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of
creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to findan effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the US market.
So, for instance, Nielsen SoundScan data shows new album releases stood at 35,516 in 2000, peaked at 106,000 in 2008, and (amidst a general recession) fell back to mid-decade levels of about 75,000 for 2010. That’s against a general background of falling sales since 2004—mostly explained by factors unrelated to piracy—which finally seems to have reversed in 2011. The actual picture is probably somewhat better than that, because SoundScan data is markedly incomplete when it comes to the releases by indie artists who have benefited most from the rise of digital distribution.
If we look at movies, the numbers compiled by the industry statistics site Box Office Mojo show an average of 558 releases from American studios over the past decade, which rises to 578 if you focus on just the past five years. The average for the previous decade—before illicit movie downloads were even an option on most people’s radar—is 472 releases per year. (As we learn from a recent Congressional Research Service report, it’s weirdly hard to detect a strong overall correlation between output and employment in the motion picture industry, which actually fell slightly from 1998 to 2008, even as profits and CEO pay soared. One reason is the growing trend in recent decades for “Hollywood” features to actually be produced in Canada or Australia.)
As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.
The second article - http://www.freakonomics.c
Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.
These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
Also this - http://www.cato-at-libert
Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down, and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars. Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here’s the upshot: The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods. Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon with different policy implications from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software. The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from.
I am keeping it short for the sake of brevity but reading the original articles would be quite informative.
Directors probably have mixed feelings.
On the positive side, most artists want their work to be sought after, seen and loved. I imagine there are more torrents for wildly popular and well-loved films than for unpopular and disliked films.
On the neutral side, unless the director has equity participation in the film, piracy does not directly impact their paycheck. Their fee is contractual.
On the negative side, piracy causes investors and distributors to reduce their revenue projections for future films. This will result in fewer films getting made and reduced budgets for those that do. Fewer films means fewer jobs for all creative and crew. Reduced budgets (among other things) can result in lower fees for key creative.
If the director in question loves the cinematic experience, they might also perceive widespread distribution of 700MB avis with compressed audio as a negative.
On the positive side, most artists want their work to be sought after, seen and loved. I imagine there are more torrents for wildly popular and well-loved films than for unpopular and disliked films.
On the neutral side, unless the director has equity participation in the film, piracy does not directly impact their paycheck. Their fee is contractual.
On the negative side, piracy causes investors and distributors to reduce their revenue projections for future films. This will result in fewer films getting made and reduced budgets for those that do. Fewer films means fewer jobs for all creative and crew. Reduced budgets (among other things) can result in lower fees for key creative.
If the director in question loves the cinematic experience, they might also perceive widespread distribution of 700MB avis with compressed audio as a negative.
Indie directors don't like it. It's flattering to have a ton of torrents, but that doesn't put food on the table. Period. Musicians can always tour when people steal their music, but filmmakers cannot. There is no way to justify stealing a movie. It's stealing and you should never do it. I don't know how people sleep at night when they steal a movie from an independent. So much heart and soul and blood and sweat goes into making a film without Hollywood backing.
Our only recourse as filmmakers is twofold:
1. To get paid better up front out of the production budget. (The problem is, the passionate director always ends up putting that money back into the project.)
2. Make a film that targets a demographic that doesn't steal as much. 14-24 yr old males steal alot. Millions of people stole my last film, I learned the hard way that it was my target demo. Yet I don't want to make kids movies (parents don't take the time to steal as much) nor do I want to make films for older people just yet. (They still have morals.)
There are companies that specialize in going after every uploader and downloader for infringement, so filmmakers can get paid that way. A filmmaker can make anywhere from $500-3000 per person that steals and wants to settle instead of getting sued for 150k for statutory damages. The catch is there is a 3-6 month window.
This will happen more and more until people are reminded that they're stealing. So, if you're stealing, stop now, and pay the 5 bucks on Amazon, don't be lazy. If you make it to 6 months from now without getting a letter, you're good.
Studios backed away from going after the end user after the Hurt Locker because of the negative press they received. Indies shouldn't. They are self-financing their projects in the hopes that they'll get a good distribution deal.
Distribs have told me that since the bottom of the market fell out in 2008, indies have a better chance making money in Vegas. That is the cold-hearted truth straight from the horses mouth.
Keith Alan Morris, Assistant Professor - Film, Dillard University
Gutter King writer/dir/prod
Our only recourse as filmmakers is twofold:
1. To get paid better up front out of the production budget. (The problem is, the passionate director always ends up putting that money back into the project.)
2. Make a film that targets a demographic that doesn't steal as much. 14-24 yr old males steal alot. Millions of people stole my last film, I learned the hard way that it was my target demo. Yet I don't want to make kids movies (parents don't take the time to steal as much) nor do I want to make films for older people just yet. (They still have morals.)
There are companies that specialize in going after every uploader and downloader for infringement, so filmmakers can get paid that way. A filmmaker can make anywhere from $500-3000 per person that steals and wants to settle instead of getting sued for 150k for statutory damages. The catch is there is a 3-6 month window.
This will happen more and more until people are reminded that they're stealing. So, if you're stealing, stop now, and pay the 5 bucks on Amazon, don't be lazy. If you make it to 6 months from now without getting a letter, you're good.
Studios backed away from going after the end user after the Hurt Locker because of the negative press they received. Indies shouldn't. They are self-financing their projects in the hopes that they'll get a good distribution deal.
Distribs have told me that since the bottom of the market fell out in 2008, indies have a better chance making money in Vegas. That is the cold-hearted truth straight from the horses mouth.
Keith Alan Morris, Assistant Professor - Film, Dillard University
Gutter King writer/dir/prod
I think a better question would be: What do directors think if nobody torrents their movie? I seriously think torrenting is a good thing for film- and musicmakers etc. In my experience, only a small percentage of people actually bother going through the process of installing the right soft- and hardware and learning how to use it. These are the power users who watch a lot and - if they like it- are inclined to share with their circles who are in turn likely to buy or vod etc.
Besides that, loads of movies and tv shows are simply not or only years after initial airing available in large parts of the world. Take for example a TV show like Breaking Bad. It became immensely popular because of people who downloaded it years before it became available (in Holland). Now it is available and loads of people watch it legally because there was already so much fuss about it.
And then there's the pricing that's by and large still based on a model where studio's and labels had created a monopoly on distribution. In this day and age where datatransfer is so easy it's ludicrous to expect people to still pay the old prices of $7,- to watch a movie. Or pay almost $15,- for a cd they might only listen to once or twice. (these are realistic prices in Europe).
Besides that, loads of movies and tv shows are simply not or only years after initial airing available in large parts of the world. Take for example a TV show like Breaking Bad. It became immensely popular because of people who downloaded it years before it became available (in Holland). Now it is available and loads of people watch it legally because there was already so much fuss about it.
And then there's the pricing that's by and large still based on a model where studio's and labels had created a monopoly on distribution. In this day and age where datatransfer is so easy it's ludicrous to expect people to still pay the old prices of $7,- to watch a movie. Or pay almost $15,- for a cd they might only listen to once or twice. (these are realistic prices in Europe).
