This article reports that the TV show "Game of Thrones,"was the most pirated show in 2012. The city with the most illegal downloads was London, and the country with the most illegal downloads was the US. While Hollywood is peaking its concern about piracy, HBO's programming president sees it as a sign of success. He's taking this high demand as a compliment, and said in an interview that it didn't negatively impact their DVD sales. The co-creator of the hit show agreed, but said if viewers could pay just 99 cents for their download rather than illegally watching it, the show could pay for a few more "dragon scenes."
Do you think HBO is being too lax about piracy? What do you think would happen to the entertainment market if piracy laws were more strict?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/02/technology/game-of-thrones-piracy/index.html?iid=HP_LN
Do you think HBO is being too lax about piracy? What do you think would happen to the entertainment market if piracy laws were more strict?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/02/technology/game-of-thrones-piracy/index.html?iid=HP_LN
2 comments:
Illegal downloading seems to be an unavoidable problem. On one hand, shows miss out on a lot of potential revenue they could have gotten from selling episode. On the other, many viewers would never even watch the show if they had to pay for it. Many people will still tune in on television to watch a show the day it premieres, giving money to the show through the channel's commercials. As long as the illegal downloaded is prevented as best as possible until the day after each episode premiers, then it does not seem to cause huge losses.
This article also made the think about the piracy I saw in a lot of foreign nations that involved reselling DVDs. I admit, I bought several pirated copies of films, mostly because they were so cheap, but I also felt better giving my money to the poor Vietnamese family selling them, whose livelihood depended on this resale of copyrighted work. While I sympathize for a TV show creator, like the one interviewed about Game of Thrones, I would still rather choose to make a purchase from that family running the DVD shop, than to a millionaire producer who is getting tremendous revenue despite the piracy rates.
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