AFACT: Australian movie pirates fund terrorists
For every bootleg movie out there shot with a video camera, some schmuck sat in the theatre and taped the entire thing on a portable video camera. Craig Farrugia was one such person and after being found guilty of camming movies at Blacktown drive in for the scene group ‘PreVail’, was fined $5400 and given an 18 month good behaviour bond.
Apparently this didn’t go down well with the powers that be although to be honest I’m not quite sure what they expected.
Last week I wrote about Brendan Roy Taylor and how he was fined earlier this month just $150 for stealing and attempting to sell 60,000 credit card numbers and details. For now, it seems that Australia is happy to prosecute cyber crime perpetrators but once it gets to court the punishments are simply woefully inadequate.
I’m sure after a measly $5000 fine Craig Farrugia has learnt his lesson.
Obviously realising the law isn’t going to deter people, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) are now attempting to push a new strategy that sounds like it’s straight out of the Bush/WMD era.
Buying pirated movies supports terrorism.
Why syndicates running out of Asia would bother to rely on an Australian cammer I have no idea. A report which aired on Channel 7′s ‘Sunday Night’ featured footage of stereotypical pirate dvd malls just out in the open street along with the comical suggestion that cammers are using their mobile phones to record movies.
If this is day to day business in these districts you’d think crime syndicates would just cam out of local theatres, I mean Chinatown aside Australia is hardly known for booming piracy markets.
In the story on Sunday Night Mike Munro covers a raid in the Philippines on one such district. The streets are lined with dinghy stalls peddling pirated movies and at the conclusion of the raid an estimated 1.6 million pirated dvds were seized.
Oddly enough Neil Gane, operations manager for AFACT, mentions that “A pirated DVD can be made for as little as 25 cents”. At the conclusion of the report Mike Munro also throws in that the dvd are created in as little as 3 seconds each.
By my calculations the raid seized $4000 of goods and cost “terrorist groups” 8888 minutes or 148 hours of lost production time. I’m willing to bet that had you have gone down to the district shown in the footage the next day it’d be pretty much business as normal.
In an industry Mr Gane estimates to be globally worth 8 billion and costing Australia $233 million alone annually, what’s $4000 and just under a week of lost production time going to do?
The weakest link is the claim that movie piracy supports terrorism;
The raid costs organised crime millions of dollars, which may have been funnelled to terrorist groups such as the Bali bombers Jemaah Islamiah, according to Philippine authorities.
Australian’s are expected to swallow that dinghy stalls selling movies for a couple of dollars each are the bread and butter of terrorist organisations around the world. It doesn’t really add up does it?
Much more plausible is the estimation that the Afghanistan opium industry supplies terrorists with $50-$70 million annually. Why would terrorists rely on the fruits on some guy in Australia recording movies and then the hundreds of middle men distributors when they could just legally make money off opium?
Part of me wants to know just who exactly is buying cam movies. I mean we’ve all heard of friends coming back from Bali or some other Asian country with cheap dvds but honestly a cam or even a telecine is just so horrible to watch. Worse still, the better your home theatre equipment the worse these shitty little recordings look and sound!
You’d think that in itself would be a deterrent to squash movie piracy but it clearly doesn’t appear to be working. Personally I haven’t watched a cam or telecine since my early teenage years and back then it was more of a ‘having something first that nobody else has’ thing, which I suspect mostly drives sales today as it’s obviously not quality viewing experiences.
The other thing is with the internet so readily available who exactly is paying for this stuff? Bittorrent requires the IQ of a door handle to set up and it’s not like torrent indexing sites are hard to find. I guarantee you any movie available in physical format is already out on the internet and won’t cost you anything, well except maybe a small slice of your ethical soul.
One other possible reason is the outrageous price we pay to go to the cinemas here in Australia. If I take someone out to the movies the tickets alone are usually setting me back close to $35 and anything extra quickly pushes that to $50.
If they dropped it back to $10 or so I know I for one would be going to the movies a hell of a lot more often. Often being more then the once a year or so I’ve gone over the last five years.
Comparably back in the 80′s and early 90′s when cinema prices weren’t ridiculous we used to go as a family a lot more often. These days for a standard 2 kids and 2 adults + extras you’re probably looking down the barrel of close to $70-$80, which for two hours or so of entertainment puts it squarely in the rare treat category.
Cinema companies need to realise people are always going to want to go to the cinemas to watch movies. No matter how big our television sets get, nothing really compares to sitting down in a cinema infront of a giant screen and experiencing true booming monster sound.
Making cinemas more attractive again will be a far more effective strategy then running around seizing a couple of thousand of dollars of material every so often. Clearly the courts aren’t in sync with the anti-piracy lobby so pursuing this course of action seems kind of fruitless.
In any case, $50 for two tickets, a coke and tub of popcorn isn’t going to see me returning to the cinemas any time soon and that is where the movie industry is really hurting.
The Sunday Night report can be viewed here. Note it seems to be slightly broken at the moment, I had the advertisement at the start having trouble steaming and then I was getting the audio for the ad 1-2 mins into the report.
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