Dredd (2012)

[Noisybast]

And its a tenner in HMV, apparently..

Ooh, that's me making a stop on the way home from work, then!

[Goaty]

11 Days to go, creeps!

[Michaelvk]

So, a local online news website just published a top ten most pirated movies list..

http://www.channel24.co.za/Multimedia/Movies/The-10-Most-Pirated-Movies-of-2012-20130102

Reading this, the average for the top 10 racks up about 7.75 million illegal downloads. This is of course excluding file sharing at the office, which can easily double that number. Lets be hypothetical and say that Dredd could ultimately suffer about 6.5 million downloads now the disc is about to be released.. Amazon's bluray price is £13.. £84.5 million.. That's a few pennies short of no less than two Dredd's.

Makes me sad.

[Jim_Campbell]

Lets be hypothetical and say that Dredd could ultimately suffer about 6.5 million downloads now the disc is about to be released.. Amazon's bluray price is £13.. £84.5 million.. That's a few pennies short of no less than two Dredd's.

Doesn't work like that. That presupposes that these people were going to buy a copy, and then decided to torrent it instead. They weren't -- these people don't pay for anything. Does that make them freeloading fuckers? Certainly? Can you multiply downloads by the full retail cost and declare this lost revenue? Well, big content frequently does but it still doesn't make it true.

There's a music analogy here: in my youth, and even as an adult, I knew lots of people whose entire music collections consisted of nothing but stuff they'd taped off other people. They owned practically no original copies of albums -- these people simply didn't buy music. They've always existed; the difference is that file-sharing means that you can see them not buying music, and they have the opportunity to not buy a lot more music than before. If you could wave a magic wand and make all the file-sharing technology disappear overnight, these people still wouldn't buy music.

Same deal with films, I'm afraid.

Cheers

Jim

[radiator]

I'd definitely argue that downloading does undoubtedly damage sales of music and films, but it's nowhere close to 1:1.

[Michaelvk]

It's not so much presupposing they'd buy a copy.. It's a 'what if' these people legitimately purchase a copy..

The top torrented movie on that list was downloaded 8.3 million times, it had a 12 million budget. What if that got the same reception as Dredd? Critically acclaimed, murdered at the box office.. Those guys would be gutted. They might as well have put the thing on youtube instead.

I completely agree with you Jim, without a doubt, but just putting some numbers to those downloads and it is quite scary..

[MR. ELIMINATOR]

I dunno, I think there would also be some people who didn't plan on buying dredd, then after seeing the torrent and how good the film is, may go out and buy it to support the film.

[radiator]

I dunno, I think there would also be some people who didn't plan on buying dredd, then after seeing the torrent and how good the film is, may go out and buy it to support the film.

Certainly, but not enough to make up for the people who would have rented or bought it but torrented it instead.

[James Stacey]

I dunno, I think there would also be some people who didn't plan on buying dredd, then after seeing the torrent and how good the film is, may go out and buy it to support the film.

My mate for one. He's downloaded it, fallen in love with it and now said he will buy the blu-ray, which he will. Some freetards are just that, they will download / copy / highspeed dub whatever, but I'd be lying if I said I'd never downloaded an album to see if it was any good before buying.

[Jim_Campbell]

Certainly, but not enough to make up for the people who would have rented or bought it but torrented it instead.

There is no data to suggest that this is true, and some small amounts of research that suggests the reverse may be true for music. Numbers are frequently bandied about by various lobby groups for Big Content, but when pressed for a definitive source, these almost always turn out to be made up.

Note that I'm not saying that your assertion isn't true, radiator, but I think Big Content has strenuously avoided looking too hard for definite numbers in case they torpedo their own arguments.

Cheers

Jim

[radiator]

I think the difference now is that it's so much easier to just grab stuff for free.

Taping songs off the radio, hooking up two VCRs etc was always a massive faff. Even copying CDs was time-consuming and costly in it's own right - a world of difference between being basically two or three mouse-clicks away from almost everything, ever, for free, on tap.

[dracula1]

There's a potential Dredd story relating to all this discussion about piracy and online cyber crime for sure.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

I bet all Entertainment Companies secretly love illegal downloading sites. It's a great reason to bung a couple of quid more onto a DVD,CD etc since they can claim it's covering themselves financially from the revenues lost due to Piracy.

The Tobacco Industry effectively condoned illegal smuggling of cigarettes since it wanted the Government to lower the high price it set for fags. It could always point to illegal smuggling claiming it was impacting on it's business and if Government wanted to create jobs in this sector it should knock a few pounds off a pack of 20. Legal purchases of tobacco would rise they reasoned bringing more money into the Tobacco companies coffers and off setting the downturn in their Industry created by the smugglers. Unfortunately they got found out but that didn't stop them trying it on in the first place.

It's dreadfully paranoid but could some of these 'Pirate' sites, seemingly allowed to exist unmolested with the occasional threat issued from some Global Corp be playing the same part in a game of fuck the consumer?

Either way legitimate user get screwed: by the Corporations upping the price on their products to cover their losses and by the illegal downloaders who get it [mostly] for free and who give the Corp Scum every excuse they need get one over on us.

[I, Cosh]

I think the difference now is that it's so much easier to just grab stuff for free.

Taping songs off the radio, hooking up two VCRs etc was always a massive faff. Even copying CDs was time-consuming and costly in it's own right - a world of difference between being basically two or three mouse-clicks away from almost everything, ever, for free, on tap.

Yeah, the assumption of 1 download = 1 sale is obviously bananas but it's the scale of the sharing which makes it so different. When you talk about taping albums from your mates, that still means you had to actually know someone who bought it and well enough to let you borrow it. Me and my friends would frequently plan out which records and computer games we were going to buy to try and avoid duplication and make our limited income go further but there would have to be some quid pro quo. Realistically, the sharing ratio goes from 2:1 or 3:1 to a situation where it can easily be 1,000,000:1 or more.

Interestingly, or incriminatingly, I will still happily lend or borrow CDs from friends in the full knowledge they'll be ripped yet I wouldn't think of downloading music illegally, nor have I ever done it with films for some reason. Not trying to defend my actions then or now (I detest the weaselly justifications people make) but that's the reality of it.

[radiator]

It does make me roll my eyes when people say "but how can piracy be harming the film industry when The Avengers makes a billion at the box office?".

Fact is, mid-budget genre films like Dredd are getting rarer and rarer, and piracy has to be a part of that. If something isn't a 'must-see' many people will just wait for the first high-quality torrent.

I've never understood why the entertainment industry doesn't hire a few hundred/thousand people around the world to spend all day, every day uploading dodgy torrents - things that aren't immediately obvious like the sound slowly going out of sync, scenes playing out of order etc etc so people wouldn't realise they had a dodgy torrent until they sat down to watch it - literally swamp the market with hundreds of thousands of them until finding a decent torrent for the latest big movie becomes like looking for a needle in a haystack, then have the same people giving bad torrents good reviews/comments and vice versa. You'd never stamp out the dedicated freeloaders completely, but all you'd have to do is make it enough of a pain in the arse so that the majority of people will start seeking out legal alternatives just to avoid the hassle.