You have to count those 374,000 jobs multiple times to come up with the true figure. After all, copyright enables you to do something once and get paid over and over for it, so a job in the copyright industry allows you to employ someone and get them to work over and over for you, so therefore it should be counted as multiple jobs. When you get a job with a company in the RIAA or MPAA, you don?t actually get the job, you only get a licence to a job. That?s where the 2.2 million figure comes from.

In round numbers, there are about six thousand theaters, with thirty-eight thousand screens, and maybe twenty people watching each screen. In other words, the notional theater has six-and-a-half screens, and a typical audience of a hundred and thirty at one time. If you make up a reasonable employee roster, viz manager, cashier, ticket-taker, two or three people at the concession stand, and projectionist; and figure two shifts, that comes out to something like twelve people, full-time-equivalent, or about seventy thousand for the entire movie theater industry, as distinct from the total of 120,000-130,000 jobs Mike Masnick cites. Presumably the ticket-takers and concession stand workers are more or less completely part-time. At least half of these jobs are obviously minimum-wage, and presumably held by high-school students or the like. Particularly if the theater’s projection systems are digital, and automated to the point that they don’t need a resident projectionist, only the manager and cashier have to be full-time, and paid more than minimum wage. The number of people whom the movie theater industry actually keeps off unemployment insurance might be more on the order of twenty-five thousand.

If the audience were not eating at the movie theater, they would be eating somewhere else. They might of course eat at home, to their great advantage, but they would probably be eating at Micky D’s instead, or else in a shopping mall food court. The counter help at a movie theater would simply be employed at a fast food restaurant instead.

What it comes down to is that, outside of Hollywood, the employment implications of the movie industry are minimal.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091211/0955157308.shtml#c380

To take another point, the category “people employed in producing movies” might very well contain large numbers of people producing wedding movies and suchlike. The apparent growth may simply be a matter of large numbers of wedding photographers acquiring video capability. These kinds of movies have essentially no sales potential outside of the friends and family of the lucky couple.

Mike, you are a sneaky one.

First off, your only source is the congressional report, which we have already shown is NOT telling anywhere near all the truth. As an example, while it shows box office gross up, it doesn’t show ticket sales (actual numbers of people going to the theaters) as dropping fairly quickly. Only increases in ticket prices and 3D “surcharge” tickets have kept them in the game.

As for “jobs”, the numbers are also somewhat misleading because they include full and part time together in the same pot. So that means that the student who works 4 hours as a theater usher on Saturday each week is equal in the report to a camera operating filming a production 60 hours a week.

Further, let’s be fair here: you already “debunked” these numbers as bullshit, so why are you relying on them to try to make a point? Hypocrite much?

The small city of New Zealand had 50 employed in movie making up until 1999 but now have over 2000. Thanks all ye unions in America for enabling this. Its a sweet reward and saved our economy

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