Your audience is not your enemy, #12,964

An Arlington movie theatre is prosecuting a 19-year-old cinema-goer (WaPo) for recording a 20-second clip of the Transformers movie to show to her 13-year-old brother.  In doing so they have significantly increased the incentives for people to pirate films in two different ways.

(1) This is apparently part of a "zero-tolerance" approach to recording movies on the part of the cinema.

Remember what happened when airport security was cranked up to accommodate the fiction that terrorists can manufacture liquid explosives in-flight? Airlines took a big hit in profits (MarketWatch). Customers dislike being treated like criminals. They dislike the inconvenience of added security checks. Some of them withdraw their custom.

Making it a little bit more unpleasant to visit cinemas is just the encouragement cinema audiences need to chuck the whole thing in and take to watching movies at home. Incentive to more piracy number one.

(2) Not only was the clip taken in this instance commercially valueless,  making it harder for people to take poor-quality copies of films using camcorders and mobile phones generally increases the incentives to consume pirate copies. See Umair on this - because one of the costs of choosing a pirate copy is the risk of getting a wobbly camcorder version of the film with tinny sound and people's heads in the way of the shot, making it harder for people to record films in cinemas actually increases the average value of all pirate copies by weeding out a lot of duds. Post a policy of zero-tolerance in cinemas, every pirate copy you download is more likely to be high quality. Incentive to more piracy number two.

Comments

[Gareth Stack]

Very cogent argument Seamus. Not that the recording industry or studios are likely to respond to reason any time soon, as they continue their headlong flight to self destruction.

[Seamus McCauley]

Gareth - problem is, I'm not even sure what I'd advise studios and other rights-owners to do in the new world. It's especially difficult to imagine what useful function the recording industry serves now that the costs of music production, distribution and marketing are close to zero. Any ideas on how you'd advise the recording industry to do something positive to secure their own survival received with great interest!

Thanks for commenting.

[solfilm]

This was actually a good read, thanks for writing it. :)