Hollywood Hates Pirates

In movies, pirates are brilliant - great big angry beardy men with eye-patches and parrots. In real life, pirates are people that download movies off the Internet. Some might have beards, eye-patches and parrots - we just don’t know.

Hollywood likes pretend pirates, it even makes Johnny Depp dress up like one and jiggle about every now and again. But Hollywood hates Internet pirates. It hates them so much that several different movie studios are gathering together to research and implement new technologies to stop Internet movie pirates.

If you go to the cinema regularly, you’ll notice that Hollywood
production companies are bricking themselves about pirates. Before a
film starts, the audience has to sit through roughly 18 hours of
warnings about piracy. There’s the one that tells you that every penny
you spend on pirated DVDs goes directly into a fund to build a Death
Star for Al-Qaida. "OK then," people think after about a millisecond
"I’ll just download the movie for free instead."

But Hollywood has an answer for that, too. They have another warning
that says if you watch a downloaded movie on a PC, the screen isn’t as
big and you’ll miss out on the cinema experience. That experience, for
those of you who don’t know, is basically paying seven million pounds
to sit in an uncomfortable seat with zero legroom surrounded by the
sound of two hundred people grinding up popcorn with their stupid idiot
teeth.

So Hollywood knows it faces an uphill battle. That’s why the six
major studios have got together and created the vague-sounding Motion
Picture Laboratories Inc, a non-profit organisation that will try to
invent ways to stop movie piracy once and for all. There’s talk of
fitting cinemas with camcorder-jamming technologies, and inventing better ways of
preventing movies from being sent across the Internet.

As woolly as all of this sounds, the studios are serious about it -
they’re ploughing $30 million into Motion Picture Laboratories Inc in
it’s first three years. It sounds a lot, but it’s claimed that the
Hollywood studios lose $3.5 billion a year through piracy.

Again, that sounds a lot. But they’d probably lose a lot less if they stopped making such shit films.

Read more:

Film studios unite to beat piracy - BBC

[story by Stuart Heritage]