Swine Flu Blamed For Pushing Pirated DVD Sales
Swine Flu isn’t just a threat to your health, it’s a threat to the legal music and movie industry.
That, at least, is the claim being made by local business associations and intellectual property rights groups.
They say the A/H1N1 flu outbreak has led people to stay at home and rent, buy or download pirated DVDs instead of getting legitimate ones from Blockbuster or other stores.
“As a consequence of the voluntary self-isolation people are imposing on themselves to avoid getting the flu, the consumption of pirated goods and online downloads has increased,” the groups said in a statement last week.
Oscar Laino, president of the UTSA author’s union, said the pirated movie industry is ruining the legitimate movie industry.
“The percentage of pirated purchases nears 80% of the total number of DVDs sold, making this industry, which provides work to 25,000 families, unsustainable,” he said.
Aldo Fernández, president of the UAV video editors association, said that in 2006 there were 1,179 video rental stores in the country. Since then 414 have either closed or become pirated DVD clubs.
“Today we’re seeing how the flu has increased the gap,” Fernández said. “In two years the renting of movies has declined by 50%. This is due directly to the increase pirated goods, and more than anything else to their sale on the streets, at fairs, and in many newspaper and magazine kiosks which sell them for prices cheaper than or similar to what you’d pay to rent them in video clubs.”
The UTSA and the UAV called on the Labor and Justice Ministries to curb the sale of pirated goods, saying that the success of the pirated DVD industry is destroying honest jobs and increasing crime.
Popularity: 1% [?]
That may be true, but it seems a bit ridiculous to complain about copyright infringement in a country where half the population lives in poverty and if one of these families of four had 80 pesos (which is what it costs to go to the movies), they’d be spending it food or two good coats bought on the black market so their kids don’t freeze when they can’t afford to pay the gas bill (which just went up by more than 100%). There are way more than 25,000 families here that survive by selling black market cds, dvds, to the hundreds of thousands that couldn’t afford to buy those goods in the normal marketplace. Enforced copyright laws are a luxury of wealthy societies that have the economic development, legal system and policing to enforce those laws. And the irony is that Disney, Pixar and the other studios profit more from the existence of a black market than they loose. If only 1 in 10 kids can afford to go to the movies with his parents, only 1 in 10 kids is going to know Manny the Mammoth. And how many Manny the Mammoth Tshirts, stickers, stuffed animals, McDonald meals, training toilets are you going to be able to sell if you are the producer and only 10% of the kids out there know about Manny. Not many. But if 10 in 10 kids knows who Manny is, now you’ve got something … even if you aren’t the only one profiting.
Oscar and Aldo should be thanking black market vendors for the free marketing.
It is rough on the video rental business, but that business is going away in every country because of online distribution. It is a business that won’t exist in 10 years. If Oscar and Aldo want to do something about it, they should think about how Argentina can use all the find minds and talent in computer technology to create the next generation of movie distribution (wouldn’t it be cool to see computer technology made somewhere outside of a 50 mile radius of San Francisco?), instead of whining over a train that left the station a decade ago.
Why pay for an original movie when the pirated one is the same but cheaper?
Ha, keep the proles scared, just to support big business. Isn’t it funny when it comes back and bites them in the bum.
The trouble is now we have realised that swine flu is just a storm in a teacup, they will have to find something else to scare us with.