You may remember that the film 'Wolverine' (the 4th in the X-men film series, but chronologically set first...) was leaked, unfinished, on to the internet. We wondered if all this free publicity and/or piracy would damage the film's profit upon release? It seems it is a hard question to answer; while the film hid very well, it did not do was well as the comparable Iron Man, but it also did much poorer in reviews that Iron Man. Here's a couple of opinions...
The answer is unknowable, of course, and the file-sharing community will no doubt point to the big total as proof that piracy doesn't really hurt the studios, at least not when it comes to theatrical boxoffice. But a close look at the numbers suggest the leak indeed might have cost Fox. How much? Tons of variables are at work here; everything from mixed reviews to swine flu....
And..
Additionally, I'm honestly of the view that internet piracy really doesn't substantially impact the bottom line on most blockbuster movies. The folks that are downloading the film are doing so knowing that they're getting a different experience - no one that cares is fooled into thinking that can "replicate" the movie-going experience. And if they don't care, you can't harness that money. It is lost, because if they don't care about the substantial differences between seeing a crappy, unfinished version of a movie on a 14" screen and seeing a polishing, 5.1 Dolby surround sound version on a giant movie screen (not to mention the atmosphere opening weekend brings), you're not going to convince them to spend a dime on your film....
And here is another good links (with comments from Tom from plugincinema) - on the excellent p2p foundation website:
My analysis of the Pirate Bay, based on my research thus far is at best it will be a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution and at worse it will still further damage them. To elaborate, I believe that p2p follows the pattern of evolution and any prosecution/legal change acts as a new environmental hazard - some forms of p2p will be impacted by the change and others will be immune and survive, then thrive in the gap left behind. Just as ’species’ is an attempt to place a classification around an always changing pattern of life, ‘copyright’ is an attempt to place a legal boundary around an always changing pattern of ideas.
There is another factor to consider that some are reporting as significant, the drop in Swedish p2p traffic when the law changed to make it easier to presecute individual illegal file traders which in an article in the International Herald Tribune is being seen as part of a series of victories against piracy that might mean copyright can win. It can’t. However this, like the Pirate Bay victory, is no more than an single change to a single environmental factor and the mass of p2p will simply evolve round it using other techniques (IM or virtual hardrives as in S.Korea) and betters p2p software such as encrypted and dark-nets (as in Japan).
Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, recently tweeted that “[The] Pirate Bay trial will change things the way the Napster shutdown changed things.” That’s an interesting thought. Of course, the Napster shutdown didn’t change too much for file sharers, who just migrated to other platforms. But the trial against and eventual demise of Napster changed P2P as a whole, because it led to the emergence of Gnutella and KaZaa, both of which eventually became more mature technologies, capable of handling far greater numbers of file sharers with a lot less infrastructure.
Some folks at Microsoft Research of all places have come up with a clever way for you to save electricity and increase your ratio: The researchers have built the prototype of a new network adapter called Somniloquy that can download data via Bittorrent and even offer basic Instant Messaging capabilities while the PC is in sleep mode.
Apparently there will be appeals, but at this point the verdict is;
Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.
But, of course, what happened post Grokster should give you an indication of what will happen here: basically, the entertainment industry will gleefully declare victory, and make statements about how this is a major victory against "piracy." But, in actuality, the exact opposite of that will occur. Unauthorized file sharing continues (or even increases) and it becomes that much more difficult for the legacy industries to win back customers and embrace these new, useful and efficient tools of distribution and promotion. It's a classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.
Here's horizontal integration - with a difference - a Fox film reviewer Roger Friedman, got fired for writing a review about the much pirated, but as yet unfinished Wolverine film - also made by Fox;
On Friday, the film studio 20th Century Fox — owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate ruled by Mr. Murdoch — became angry after reading Friedman's latest column, a review of 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine,' a big-budget movie that was leaked in unfinished form on the Web last week. Friedman posted a mini-review, adding, 'It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer.' The film studio, which enlisted the FBI to hunt the pirate, put out a statement calling Friedman's column 'reprehensible' while News Corporation weighed in with its own statement, saying it had asked Fox News to remove the column from its Web site. 'When we advised Fox News of the facts,' the statement said, 'they promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.'"
It will be interesting to see if all this free publicity damages the film's profit upon release.
Remember how you can scan any bar code with an android phone and it will tell you where to find that product for cheaper? A new Android application called BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent) can scan any DVD bar code and then signals either uTorrent or Vuze on your PC to download the movie from BitTorrent. How long do you think this will last?
The idea was to create a gutsy, lively and entertaining film using engines from a computer game that could create low bandwidth/quality images that would be fitting to be screened on the net. One of the things I really like about it is the extreme pixellation in places where it has undergone quite dramatic compression for the web...it really adds to the grungy feel.
