Hollywood encouraging piracy
None of the movie studios would talk to me on the record about this subject, so I can’t tell you why so many major movies are missing. Obviously somebody, somewhere, objects to releasing the rights—a lawyer, a director, a studio executive. (Disney’s Web site answers the question this way: “Unfortunately, it is not possible to release or have all our titles in the market at once.” Oh, okay. So they’re not available because they’re not available.)
The people want movies. None of Hollywood’s baffling legal constructs will stop the demand. The studios are trying to prevent a dam from bursting by putting up a picket fence.
And if you don’t make your product available legally, guess what? The people will get it illegally. Traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009, and file downloading is expected to grow about 23 percent annually until 2015. Why? Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, guess how many of them are available to rent online, as I write this in midsummer 2012? Zero. That’s right: Hollywood is actually encouraging the very practice they claim to be fighting (with new laws, for example).
Hollywood will make new laws. They will extradite people from their homelands for simply linking to torrents. But they won’t make their movies available by illegitimate means to the consumer. Fuck these guys.
