Report: In Bollywood, Movie Piracy Is Largely Carried Out By Rival Publishing Houses

from the inside-job dept

To hear it from the film industry writ large, a certain picture is painted in one's head when film piracy is discussed. That image is of a person, typically young, perhaps living in Mom and Dad's basement and covered in Cheetos dust, illicitly downloading film after film for their personal enjoyment, cackling evilly all the while. And, hey, personal downloading that amounts to infringement is certainly a thing.

But it's not the only thing. In India, where Bollywood has often put out the same old story about the evils of piracy, and where the government recently ramped up criminal penalties for recording or transmitting films and audio, one newspaper has comments from within the industry that suggest much of the film piracy in question is specifically enabled by rival publishing houses.

According to a Tamil cinema DVD seller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, piracy is mostly an inside job. The source explains that movie companies are leaking each other’s films, as a competitive move.

“People from rival production companies or those from the creative department secretly release the movie online or circulate it as DVDs to hit the collection at the box office,” the source said.

This sounds like a Wild West story, but the allegations don’t stop there. Another source said that the local censor board and distribution houses are also on the piracy bandwagon.

“Another industry source said insiders in the censor board and distribution houses sell these copies for up to `5 lakh. The copies are uploaded on private portals that have dedicated passkeys,” the Times of India reports.

None of this specifically excuses downloading a film illicitly, of course. However, it most certainly does call into question the industry claims that piracy is by and large harming the wider film industry. If that were true, then these industry insiders uploading cam-footage and other films of recent releases would be committing self-inflicted wounds. Doing so would make little sense, were the larger claims of the industry true.

Amazingly, this goes even further down the chain, supposedly. These insiders work with theater owners to get these recordings, rather than movie-going citizens.

When it comes to recording video and audio at movie theaters, it is believed that some movie industry insiders work in tandem with theater owners to leak high profile films. As a result, some films appear online just hours after their official premiere.

So we have multiple layers of India's film industry facilitating the infringement of that industry's films to harm the competition, all while the studio heads and government say that it really hurts the entire film industry. If all of this is true -- and it's definitely an "if" --, it would appear that Bollywood is very busy harming itself for reasons that can't be explained.

Other than to say that the industry's hand-wringing is overblown, of course.

Filed Under: bollywood, competition, india, movies, piracy, studios

India Criminalizes Merely Visiting A Copyright Infringing 'Blocked' Site

from the what-a-mess dept

The Indian film industry has long had a complicated relationship with piracy. After all, India's Bollywood regularly produces the most films of any other country in the world (it's often neck and neck with Nigeria). That seems to be a sign that the market is pretty healthy. After all, filmmakers keep telling us that piracy is going to destroy their reasons for making films... and yet here's a market that's making tons and tons of films (many of which are excellent). And, as we've noted in the past, the film studios in India are making lots of money, in part because they're competing effectively against piracy. And, then you even have some Indian filmmakers who recognize that piracy helps spread the message of their films to a wider audience.

And yet... because it's (oooooh! scary!) "piracy," there will always be some who freak out and come up with bad ideas. Apparently, one of those bad ideas is now the law. After already putting in place dumb site blocking laws that force ISPs, under court order, to block access to sites deemed hubs of infringement, the Indian government now says that getting around one of those blocks (hi there, VPN user!) is a criminal act that could get you three years in jail.

"What are you in for?" "Me? I used a VPN to access Archive.org."

Think I'm joking? The Internet Archive was included in the ban list. As was GitHub and Vimeo.

So why is the Indian government doing this kind of thing, despite everything noted in the first paragraph about the thriving and successful Indian creative industries? Perhaps it's because of absolutely bullshit articles like this one at "The News Minute" claiming that Indian films gross $2 billion, but piracy makes 35% more. I found that article because well-known copyright maximalist, Canadian lawyer Barry Sookman, happily tweeted the link. But you have to be pretty bad at understanding copyright law if you think it's a good article. After all, it struck me as odd for the headline to note that "piracy" makes more money than the Indian film industry. And that's because it's not true. Yes, the article starts out by claiming it does:

India's film industry, said to be the largest globally with some 1,000 movies produced each year, earns around $2 billion from legitimate sources such as screening at theatres, home videos and TV rights. But with $2.7 billion, piracy earns 35 per cent more, and a way out has proved elusive.

Where is this $2.7 billion coming from and where is it going? And if it were really true that piracy "earned" so much more money, uh, then shouldn't the Indian studios embrace piracy and start making that money for itself? But, of course, the answer is that that's not what's actually happening. It's just how the terrible reporter at The News Minute confusingly explains things, and copyright lawyers like Sookman happily retweet because it fits into his narrative. But you have to dig deeper into the article to find out that the $2.7 million "earned" by pirates is actually just the made up number of the value of movies downloaded.

"The infringing copies appear online within few hours of a film release," Singh told IANS, and added: "The Indian film industry loses around Rs 18,000 crore ($2.7 billion) and over 60,000 jobs every year because of piracy."

You see, here they're now calling the $2.7 billion "losses." Because that's a made up number that the industry wants you to believe it would have made if piracy did not exist. But that's not money "earned" by piracy. And pretending it is is incredibly dishonest. After lots of hand-wringing and whining about evil pirates, finally, at the end of the article, you have someone who speaks sense, filmmaker Anurag Basu, who recognizes the way you beat piracy is by competing with it:

"Piracy is working because people can buy a (pirated) DVD for Rs 100 and a whole family can watch it. We have to offer that kind of entertainment at that price. It has to be as easy to get an original DVD as it is to get a pirated one," he said.

But, instead of doing that, the government is buying into ridiculous claims about pirates "earning" more money, and thus they're now trying to criminalize merely accessing a website that they've banned for having infringing material. Websites like the Internet Archive and Vimeo.

Filed Under: blocks, bollywood, copyright, crime, india, piracy, punishment, site blocking

US Chamber Of Commerce: Bollywood Is So Successful Without Strong Copyrights That It Will Fail Unless India Strengthens Its Copyrights

from the wtf? dept

The US Chamber of Commerce, the giant lobbying organization who led the fight for SOPA/PIPA, is apparently so invested in "must have stronger copyright laws" that it doesn't even bother making sense any more. It's released a bizarre statement claiming that India needs stronger copyright laws, because Bollywood is so successful. Right upfront, it notes how successful things have been:

Boasting the largest film industry in the world, the creative sector lies at the heart of the Indian culture and economy. As one of India’s largest employment sectors, an endless array of local professionals from technical, theatrical, and creative backgrounds are helping churn out 1,000 films in more than 20 languages annually.

You'd think those are signs that copyright law was working (largest film industry in the world, largest employment sectors, over 1,000 films produced annually -- about double Hollywood) and that this would imply that whatever level of copyright there is in India -- which is supposed to be an incentive to creativity -- was doing a decent job. But, no, apparently it's all broken.

The government, however, must improve national intellectual property (IP) laws and enforcement if it is going to seize on this opportunity and gain recognition in the global market and further empower local creators.

Hmm. Wait, you just said that it's the world's largest film industry and an unqualified success. So, why does it need to improve those laws and enforcement?

Specifically, Indian copyright law is unclear with the 2012 Copyright Act amendments further complicating and contradicting previous rule of law. Furthermore, the 2012 Act provides for broad exceptions that are incompatible with international norms. Also measuring relatively loware enforcement efforts, which are weak in application and don’t provide widely available civil and procedural remedies for copyright infringement.

And, yet, this laxity incentivized the creation of nearly double the films that Hollywood produces. Perhaps -- and I'm just suggesting things here -- the "international norms" and the higher levels of enforcement are holding back the industries elsewhere. If anything, this report seems to suggest that other countries should move towards broad exceptions, since it appears to have been quite successful in India.

Furthermore, much of the paper seems to suggest that India needs to fix its copyright laws to embrace the international opportunity for its films -- but that (again) makes no sense. India's IP laws don't apply outside of India, so they have no impact on the international opportunities, which are governed by other IP laws. And, again, if the industry is doing great in India (with little enforcement and greater exceptions), doesn't this indicate that India should push for the same elsewhere to better embrace that international opportunity?

It's quite a world in which the US Chamber of Commerce seems to be arguing that an example of a success story should lead to that successful model emulating less successful markets. I don't know how much money the MPAA pays the US Chamber of Commerce for these kinds of pieces, but it's not getting its money's worth.

Filed Under: bollywood, copyright, india, success
Companies: chamber of commerce

Bollywood No Longer Worrying About Piracy As Studios Keep Setting New Records At The Box Office

from the look-at-that dept

For years, India was held up as a country that just didn't respect copyright law at all. We'd heard the stories about how widespread piracy was for all kinds of content. However, as we'd seen elsewhere, the claims that piracy was somehow "killing" the industry didn't really hold up under scrutiny. In fact, the Indian movie market (Bollywood) continued to grow massively and to thrive, even as piracy was rampant. That certainly seemed to contradict the old claim that infringement kills the incentives for content creation. And now, according to the Economic Times, many Indian studios have more or less stopped even talking about "piracy" because the box office is booming. The secret? It shouldn't be a surprise, since it's exactly what people have been talking about for years: making the authorized versions of the content more widely available more quickly in a variety of formats, thereby cutting off one of the main reasons why people seek out infringing copies:

A few years ago, theatre releases were limited to tier-I and tier-II cities due to high costs of prints. It took between three months and a year for a film to be released elsewhere. Consequently, films reached television and home video only after six months of a theatrical release. Pirates gleefully filled that vacuum by bombarding consumers with cheap optical discs....

Not anymore. The brightest stars of the Rs 100-crore constellation are theatres and prints.... Digital prints, which cost one-fifth of analog prints, have facilitated the swift reach of movies across the country.

There's an infographic that shows most movie releases in 2011 were shown on about double the number of movies screens as similar movies just the year before. That's a massive increase in availability for theater showings. As for the home market, while it still competes with pirated copies, quality seems to be winning:

According to Dwyer, the better-off who earlier paid to have high-quality cinema systems at home are no longer interested in poor quality (pirated) copies. "The quality of DVDs and Blu-ray discs is excellent with extra features and at a reasonable price."

While the article still says that there's a lot of infringement going on, it's just fading into the background for the most part, especially given the record-setting revenue numbers.

For one, producers are happy with the current box-office fortunes. There is also no evidence to show big hits suffering from online piracy. On the contrary, data crawls suggest that the most downloaded films are nearly always the biggest hits, according to Lawrence Liang of Bangalore's Alternative Law Forum, one of the authors of the India chapter of the Media Piracy report.

And, thus, the studios have finally realized that paying more attention to improving the authorized market is probably more important than "stomping out piracy."

What has really changed is the focus on piracy. As the case of AACT shows, the struggles against pirates are few and far between to make even news, leave alone act as a deterrent. "The tendency has been to focus always on the numbers we are capturing rather than looking at leaked markets," says Uday Singh, managing director, MPDA.

Of course, the article is still full of dire warnings about how the studios need to stay vigilant or everything might fall apart, but that seems based on random hyperbole, rather than any actual evidence.

None of this should be even remotely surprising. For years we've been pointing out that if you make works available, make them convenient and reasonably priced, and stop treating your customers like criminals, people will pay. Sure, there will always be some piracy, but those people are unlikely to pay no matter what, for the most part, and you just need to stop worrying about them and focus on giving more fans more reasons to actually pay. It appears that India is an example of a place where that's actually happening.

Filed Under: bollywood, box office, india, movies, piracy