MPAA Cheers On Totally Useless Piracy Crackdown
from the pat-yourself-on-the-backs-now dept
The MPAA (or, rather, its international arm, the MPA) is proudly cheering on the “success” of “Operation ZoomOut,” a 10-week crackdown of movie piracy in Asia. The group talks about how various retail outlets were shut down, raids on counterfeiting shops seized a bunch of DVD-burners and counterfeit movies — and that the overall number of counterfeit DVDs coming out of Asia declined. That’s great. Except for a few small facts. You can bet that if the demand is out there, plenty of others will jump in and fill the gaps pretty damn quickly and (more importantly) none of this stopped the same movies from being available to download online.
And that, of course, is the number one problem with ridiculous and costly publicity stunts by groups like the MPA. They’re useless and have no actual impact on the problem. They’re trying to deal with a digital issue by using an analog solution. Once a single digital copy gets online, it really doesn’t matter how many DVD-burners you seize. The movie’s out there, and copies are being made at an unstoppable rate. These types of raids may make for fun headlines and gives the MPA a chance to go back to the movie studios, show them they’re “doing something” and ask for more money. But it hardly does anything to deal with the new digital reality. That would require actually understanding both technology and business models — both of which seem to be well beyond the MPA (and the MPAA’s) skillset.
Filed Under: counterfeiting, crackdown, piracy
Companies: mpa, mpaa
