A little more than a month ago now I received a  letter in the mail from Paramount Pictures informing me that they had detected copyright infringement occurring at my address and that if it was detected again they would sue me for $250,000.
This, understandably, upset my parents somewhat. My dad works for the government and was worried that this would reflect poorly on him.
My mom was worried that I was going to be dragged away in chains by agents of the Movie Picture Association of America. Neither of these things occurred, and I assured all parties involved that I would not be downloading any more copyrighted material over the Internet and that I would delete all the offending data. I haven’t illegally downloaded anything else since this happened, and I don’t really plan on doing it again simply because I don’t have $250,000 to hand over to movie executives.
The whole incident has made me rather interested in the subject of copyright law and how movie and music companies choose to enforce it.
I would like to point out that the particular movie that Paramount got all flustered about was Up in the Air.
The film came out last December while I was working at a movie theater. So I had the option of seeing this movie for free while it was in theaters and Paramount never would have batted an eye.
You may have seen advertisements or public service announcements from the movie industry reporting they are losing millions of dollars a year.
They bring an emotional element into this by pointing out all the average people who work in the film industry who will lose their jobs because you were selfish enough to download the latest summer blockbusters onto your hard drive. The losses that the movie industry is reporting are a little confusing.
While I was working at a movie theater over the summer, we received completely contradictory propaganda which stated that the movie industry was doing better than ever and we should feel proud to be on the frontlines of such a prosperous line of work.
Those reported losses are even more startling when you consider that every time Christopher Nolan or James Cameron even approach a camera box office, records seem to be broken.
You see, the way the movie industry determines that they are losing millions of dollars is they look at each individual movie download as a DVD that wasn’t sold or a movie ticket that wasn’t sold and tally up the number of downloads and mark them all as losses.
The Harvard School of Business did a study to see if this was an accurate way of looking at the issue.
What they found was that the majority of downloaders were from a demographic that had low amounts of disposable income. Mostly high school and college students.
Put simply, this means that the movie industry could not count these downloads as losses because the people who are doing the downloading would not be able to pay for the product anyway.
If these people did not have access to pirated copies they simply would have gone without.
Additionally, the study found that in some cases Internet piracy helped the industry.
Some people used downloaded copies to “sample” movies or music that they were thinking about buying but were unsure of. No money is lost because they wouldn’t have purchased it.
It is also stated that downloading an album is not the same thing as shoplifting a CD since a physical copy is not being stolen.
What the downloader is getting is technically nothing more than 1s and 0s.
There is so much more I could say about this issue, but I fear I don’t have the space allowance to do it here.
If the FBI doesn’t arrest me for writing this article, I may expand upon it at a later date.
Zack Bouis is a junior majoring in psychology. He can be contacted at [email protected].