Internet Piracy Is Good For Hollywood, And Here’s Why [Op-Ed]
Internet piracy is good for Hollywood.
The subject of internet piracy has long been debated among politicians, mostly because Hollywood is trying to make the government do something to stop the distribution of their copyrighted material. Hollywood could win if the Obama administration allows SOPA to finally be made legal, as previously reported by The Inquisitr. In a way, Hollywood has every right to make money on the movies we love.
However, if the movie is terrible, we shouldn’t need to pay to watch it. How many times have we sat down in the theater to watch a really bad movie and ended up regretting putting money into the experience? How many DVDs and Blu-Rays have been sold under the pretense that the movie on it was actually worth the $15 to $30 the retailer charged, only to have it end up in a bargain bin and in countless used media stores maybe two months later? How many sequels could have been avoided if we just didn’t pay to see the first film?
Internet piracy is the way we figure out if we actually want to pay for it. The real answer, if Hollywood is dead set on fixing the problem, is to just stop making bad movies. If we see a movie we like, we’ll be more likely to pay for a legal copy.
Yes, we can still burn a DVD or Blu-Ray rip to a blank disc, but the time it takes the average computer to do that is about the same time it would take to just head to a nearby store and buy it legally. The latter situation will net you all of the special features, artwork, and deleted scenes, whereas the former will just get you a cheap DVD or Blu-Ray disc with a label you had to take the time to print out and carefully place on the disc if you didn’t just write the title on the disc with a permanent marker, and the movie is probably all you got.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, internet piracy is like winning an award. Just go to any torrent hosting site and see how many thousands of times your movie has been downloaded. Out of that number, a good number of them most likely considered what they saw worth owning and went out and paid for a legal copy. The more downloads there are, the more actual sales were promoted. In other words, having your movie illegally downloaded is a sign that people want to see it but want to be sure it’s worth paying for.
In the end, internet piracy is good for Hollywood, and will lead to more sales if the downloaders find movies they actually want to pay for. If the movie is bad, it’s not worth paying for, and that’s really the bottom line. Internet piracy is advertising you didn’t have to put a dime into, and if the movie is good enough, it could lead to a sale anyway. It’s really a win-win scenario.
What do you think of internet piracy and its ultimate effect on Hollywood?
