'Dark Knight' on its way to becoming 2008's most pirated movie
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but movie fans like to show their love for a great movie by stealing it, as data from TorrentFreak on The Dark Knight downloads suggests. With over one million downloads in just a week, The Dark Knight is quickly on its way to earning the dubious honor of being the most pirated movie of 2008.
(Credit:
Warner Brothers)
What a perverse message to send to the movie studios: we love your product so much that we refuse to pay for it. How do we expect the industry to invest in more movies like The Dark Knight if we aren't willing to fund that investment?
Microsoft's Thomas Rubin, chief counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, recently told the UK Association of Online Publishers that "the 'information wants to be free' approach not only does not work, actually it has been a disaster for almost all newspapers." While Rubin's words were somewhat self-serving, designed as they were to position Microsoft as the "safe" technology partner to the industry, to Google's detriment, he still has a point, and one that correlates to online video.
Yes, many people steal online music and video because they simply want a more convenient way to consume it. Rubin suggests that "It turn(s) out that most people do not want to steal music--they just want convenient online access to it," and I agree with that. Back when Fellowship of the Ring came out, I downloaded the movie from an IRC network and watched it for months before it hit retail. However, I also bought both the standard and extended versions, plus I saw the movie three times in the theaters. New Line Cinema made its money from me, and I got to conveniently watch the movie well before its retail release.
Yet my desire for convenience shouldn't have trumped New Line Cinema's desire for control and profit. I had no right--legal or moral--to pirate the movie to satisfy my own whims. I was wrong, and that wrong could well end up ensuring that fewer "Dark Knights" and "Fellowships" get created.
As consumers, whether of movies, software, or other digital goods, we do ourselves a disservice when we steal. I hate to rely on a Microsoft executive to teach this lesson, but Rubin's comments on the newspaper industry are instructive here:
Google continues to struggle to find a way to monetize the user-generated, amateur content on YouTube. As entertaining as some of it may be, it has so far proven to be of little commercial value.
Now let's contrast that with Google News. Put aside, for a moment, the concerns that many have expressed that Google is profiting by using others' content without permission. Consider just the economics. Google's vice president of search revealed this summer that Google News, a product that was put together in a weekend and that is run by automated search algorithms, generates $100 million in revenue for its business. That's no small sum, especially when one considers the negligible investment and extremely high margins. What it demonstrates is that quality content does have great value. Only in this case, as has been pointed out, the $100 million is a bonanza enjoyed by Google, not the creators.
Clearly this can't be the future for publishing.
Rubin is right. As technology providers, we need to foster new, convenient, and safe technologies and, hence, business models for content providers to make their products available online as wares, not warez.
Sure, it's easy to download The Dark Knight, and may even impress your friends. But do we really want YouTube entertainment? Hulu has thrived precisely because it has blended control of content with quality of content, while YouTube continues to struggle toward profitability on the back of its user-generated content model.
We may well get what we pay for. Go buy The Dark Knight now.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
This might be the most ignorant statement you have ever made.
How many hundreds of millions of dollars in profit is this movie going to make on video? How many hundreds of millions of dollars did it make in the theater?
How many people pirated the movie but are going to buy the DVD when it comes out?
How many people pirated the movie, but would not buy it?
How many people downloaded it in say, October, when it was more or less out of the theaters? No money lost there.
How much money was actually lost? An insignificant amount.
To say that movie studios are going to invest in quality movies because The Dark Knight is heavily pirated is nonsense. Especially when you consider that when all is said and done this one movie will likely exceed $1 billion in profit. It is a pretty bad argument, even for CNET.
Is it immoral to download a movie not yet available of DVD, and out of the theaters? Especially if you are going to buy it when it is available? You are confusing the concepts of legality and morality. They are not equal, one is not a subset of the other.
If you are going to argue against piracy, then do so with legitimate arguments and intelligent comments. Not mindless MPAA talking points.
You claimed that the piracy of The Dark Knight is going to lead to movies that that being made, which is totally incorrect.
Show me that piracy has hurt the profit in any meaningful way. You can't, so stop shilling for the MPAA and write something intelligent to support anti-piracy.
You claimed that the piracy of The Dark Knight is going to lead to fewer movies that that being made, which is totally incorrect.
Actually the movie in the box office made an exorbitant amount of money, lets assume for now that piracy has not somehow hurt this. However in regards to "What a perverse message to send to the movie studios: we love your product so much that we refuse to pay for it. " this is wholly inaccurate. There currently is NO way to actually pay for this movie. The correct message may be "we loved it so much we can't wait six months to see it again after we saw it in the theaters." It would be really interesting for a major film like The Dark Knight to try something: Release the movie in the theatres, then, when the movie rotates out of the box office, have the DVDs/BluRay readily available on the shelf, not six months after, but while interest is still so high (and at a reasonable price, 40 dollars is awfully high). I would imagine that the piracy patterns would be vastly different than what we have seen so far. People don't like to wait - that is why digital distribution is so popular (yes, piracy is a form of digital distribution - and currently the only actual distribution method available.
I do not support piracy nor do I partake in it myself, but what I think the movie studios are failing to realize from this is that they haven't 'lost' any money on a product until it is actually available for sale and that the distribution method that worked twenty years ago does not work anymore. Times change, companies change - I highly doubt for example that Alfresco would be so popular if you had the following choice: wait six months to see the changes to the CMS you are so excited about or steal a lesser quality version but have it available right now. I don't know why the movie industry (and to some extent the American auto industry) think they can just stay stagnant and expect the world to not evolve.
It seems a simple concept to me too - you can't lose money on a product that doesn't exist and there is a very obvious demand being unfulfilled right now in a legitimate channel.
@Seanathome
Exactly! Its not the lack of distribution options, its the tremendous lag time and restrictive nature of the legal options once they finally are available.
Then there is the delay for a movie released in the US to make it out to NZ for some artificial timing or holiday. In the days when reels had to be shipped around, then this made sense, but now digital copies can be beamed directly to cinemas, so there is no excuse not to have a worldwide release on the same day.
Then it eventually makes it out on DVD, and again we have to wait for the local stores to stock it, and then I have to go and buy it, and it will come on a shiny silver platter that might have a horrible accident in the hands of my kids or a local burgler, and I can only watch it on my player in the lounge, or I could download a copy from a torrent site, in reasonable quality (or even a full DVD RIP but bandwidth is still capped pretty low here in NZ), and I can backup that copy, or squeeze it through isquint so I can watch it on my phone, or in my CD-less net book,
Now if torrent sits can do this for free, how come the studios cant do it and make some money off advertising, or subscription service. And I definitely think controlling the regions is just a dumb idea.
I download stuff that I buy because I don't want to wait for it. I paid for it, it should be at my convenience not theirs. There is nothing wrong with downloading anything at any time when you are paying for it.
What a dirty jerk I am for wanting to see it once more before the blu-ray. And what a jerk I am for spending $10,000+ every year on vinyl, then downloading the digital copy. Shame on everyone I know who spends the same on movies and music every year.
And the point is, the people who actually "steal" media travel in small numbers. This is just fear mongering from the entertainment industry because they have lost power over the consumer. And what good is money without power?
Everyone is doing fine. I just bought a record that a band full of millionaires made. I just got done paying Directv $400 for their sunday ticket, so I can watch thousands of millionaires beat the hell out of each other on sunday. Everyones doing fine in the entertainment business. And always will.
Take your retard article and stuff it up New Lines A**.
Did I care to be perverse, I am waiting for the new Cervantes to attack the "fantastic stories about the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability"
- by Seaspray0 November 23, 2008 9:44 AM PST
- What?!? They're not going to release it on VHS? Now I'll have to get a DVD player and replace all my VHS's with DVD's. That means I'll have paid more than once for it. Do you know how long it took me to collect all those VHS's? What a scam! It's highway robbery, I tell ya! What can we do as a public to get even?
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