White Wedding Pirated.

Interesting that the Times would file this story under "Entertainment". Surely it should be under "Crime"?

Pirated Film on Sale for R50.00

It turns out that locally-produced hit movie White Wedding was been pirated within a month of its release. Illegal copies of the film, which was only released on April 29, have for been on sale on the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town for a fortnight already - for a mere R50.



To put this in perspective: the amount of copies seized in a raid this week would account for R250000 in DVD sales which would have taken away up to 15 percent from box office receipts from the film.

Piracy is such a quaint term; images of Johnny Depp and blue Caribbean seas abound. But it's neither sweet nor romantic, it's theft - and it's your livelihood they are stealing.

Wolverine saga continues

Fox News has fired Roger Friedman, a journalist who posted an online review of the unfinished and illegal copy of Gavin Hood's movie Wolverine.

DMW is running a poll - (given the significant piracy issues) do you think it's right that he was fired?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is due to launch - officially - in SA on April 29th.

DVD Copying and Piracy Issues

In the United States, the National Consumers League has publiushed results of a new study conducted by Opinion Research showing that 90% of consumers believe they should be able to back up their DVDs to a hard drive or copy them to a portable device - and that they'd be willing to pay about $61 for a piece of software that helped them back up their collections. According to the survey:

• 55% of respondents are buying fewer DVDs today than they did a year ago.
• More than four in 10 (41%) expect to be buying fewer still a year from now.
• 41% said the ability to make back up copies would make their collections more valuable
• 40% said it might cause them to buy more DVDs.
• Households with kids have purchased an average of nearly 3 DVDs to replace those lost or damaged.
• Despite studio fears that back-up copying will lead to massive Internet piracy, only 18% of respondents reported ever having copied a DVD to a hard drive.
• Another 5% said they had tried but were unable to.
• The vast majority of respondents (79%) said they have no real interest in copying DVDs.

And, according to DMW, what have the studios come up with to deliver that value to their customers? Litigation against Kaleidescape Systems and RealDVD for providing tools that allow people to back up their DVD collections.

Piracy

A few days back, DMW reported that the U.S.A is claiming victory over China in a World Trade Organization dispute over the country's protection of intellectual property, and the unauthorized sale of copyrighted and counterfeit goods in the country. Specifically, the WTO found that China is not living up to trade agreements by requiring that foreign movies and music be approved by state censors before they are eligible for copyright protection. It also took China to task for allowing counterfeit goods seized by authorities to be resold after simply removing the fake trademarks.



In South Africa, movie piracy is often seen as something that only affects Hollywood; bootlegged copies of the latest Spiderman don't really drive a lot of people to distraction (well, they might do, depending on how bad the copy is, I suppose)

At this point in time though, it's home-grown piracy that will kill our local filmmaking industry stoney cold dead; by selling well-known Hollywood films at low, low prices and by copying and selling on local films and thereby denying revenue to self-finded producers, a growing Durban film sector is extremely vulnerable to copyright infringment and piracy.

Taking the Nigerian experience again as an example; allegedly if a Nigerian film can't make it's money back in about three weeks, it won't get made. After that point, the bulk of the profit is siphoned off to pirates. How many Durban flmmakers can afford to work in that economic environment?