I've never been very subtle about my take on pirating our films. It's theft, plain and simple.Pirating our movies doesn't help us one bit--anyone who says it does is simply rationalizing their behavior.
There's an article here that's interesting to note about one movie that may not be happening due to piracy, and THAT'S a movie that actually gets a serious distributor, so they get paid actual advances and whatnot.
http://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/the-abcs-of-death-3-happen-pirates/?utm_content=buffer83960&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
But there's another problem that's become more of an issue, and that's Youtube. People are uploading full versions of movies(including ours) so that people can watch the entire movie without paying a dime.
The only thing we can do is submit a copyright notification so that Google, owners of Youtube, will remove the video. (at their leisure)
Meanwhile, the people uploading these videos are collecting Ad Revenue from OUR movies, and Google won't give that money to us, even after finding out that the video was illegally uploaded.
How can this be? I have no idea.
Viacom actually sued Google for 1 billion in damages for videos of theirs, but the case was settled out of court for apparently NO MONEY. Apparently Google is more or less protected because of an idiotic clause in the DMCA act that says as long as a web site removes copyrighted material after being notified about it, it's all good.
Think about that.
Do you know of any other law you can break where you're okay if you simply STOP doing it after you're informed it's illegal? "Yeah, I stole that car, but I totally returned it when I was notified that it was stolen."
Meanwhile Viacom was saying, quite rightfully, that they were having to hire people to police Youtube on a 24 hour basis for violations. Why is it up to the copyright holders to pay money to police Youtube? It should be up to Youtube--and when it finds someone's copyright violated, it should pull all ad dollars made on that video and apply them to the copyright holder's account.
The internet's opened up a lot of distribution doors for indie filmmakers, but I have to tell you that the negatives are pretty weighty. Here's hoping Google gets its act together regarding Youtube.
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