Motion Picture Association Gets Some China Anti-Piracy Competition
The China Film Copyright Protection Association (CFCPA) held a press conference recently to announce that had filed its first ever civil copyright lawsuit since it morphed from a simple trade association to a copyright management group back in 2008.
It said it had filed a complaint of copyright infringement against
365pub.com, Cnnip.com, in addition to several unnamed Internet cafes, and is seeking an end to the infringement, a public apology, and, of course monetary damages. (Zeropaid.com)
While copyright infringement suits are extremely common in China these days, including suits that deal with online distribution of digital works, this one is a first for an association that represents motion picture studios.
Until now, that sort of activity is something one associates with the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a U.S.-based trade association that has been on the IP beat in China for a very long time. In addition to the usual lobbying and education campaigns, the MPA has even gotten into the litigation game, hiring local law firms to go after DVD shops, etc.
I suppose the MPA welcomes the “competition.” The more voices out there drumming up interest in copyright infringement and going after the bad guys, the better.
Even more interesting, though, would be a China-based industry group that sponsors industry studies and regularly puts out infringement statistics. A great deal of U.S. government activity on this front is supported, or should I say goaded on, by MPA-sponsored research, some of which I have criticized on this blog in the past for questionable methodology (others have as well).
If CFCPA or other groups consistently publish statistics that differ from those of the MPA, that will at the very least muddy the waters. In the article I excerpted above, I found this quote to be particularly noteworthy:
“Playing pirated films on the Internet for just three days probably lost us 100 million yuan at the box office,” said An Xiaofen, producer of the popular Chinese action film Ip Man 2, one of the movies observed being pirated en masse.
Xiaofen estimates that he lost perhaps as much as 100 million yuan ($15 million USD) being that the number of illegal downloads has surpassed some 10 million, and at least one third of pirates usually otherwise buy a legal copy of the DVD. [my emphasis]
I don’t know if Mr. An is associated with CFCPA or not, but his comment about how many illegal downloaders would actually end up purchasing a legal copy if the pirated version was unavailable is something you rarely see in a MPA publication. The MPA often likes to imply that the number of illegal copies and the number of lost sales are the same number.
Looks like China’s movie industry folks might be a bit more realistic when it comes to piracy and lost profits.
I’m not sure that 1/3 is that realistic either. I may not be the “average consumer”, nor am I Chinese, but of the films/TV I download (or watch streaming) illegally, there’s no way I’d pay for DVDs of even a third of it. This is even truer for music, but there’s a BIG difference between downloading a movie to check it out, and being willing to pony up $20 for the “collectors edition” DVD [which is somehow always the only version in stock anywhere].
Based on my own habits and those of my friends, I’d peg that number at somewhere closer to 1/10.
These stats are impossible to support, of course, because there is no control group in this market. People here always know there is a cheap/free alternative, so even when you ask them if they’d be willing to pay market price, I suspect the survey results do not reflect reality.
Regardless, 30% is pretty far from 100%, and everyone can agree that 100% is a ridiculous, disingenuous number to throw around.
Don’t forget through that the Chinese market is also heavily restricted for foreign films, only a 100 or so per year being officially allowed to be released. So while there is no way MPA can claim it would make those sales if not for piracy, the biggest reason for their lack of revenue is that China won’t allow most of their genuine films in. So the pirates fill the gap. So no-one makes any genuine sales. A nice circle where no-one wins except commercial pirates!
The question is how many folks would actually pay to see those movies if they were let in. There’s a great deal of unsupported speculation on that front as well. Certainly there is a great deal of lost revenue, but I believe the numbers are probably inflated to some degree.