Losing the War Against Pirates, Copyrights and Trademarks
By Roger Paradiso
According to Ruth Vitale of CreativeFuture, “the film and television industry comprises 2.32 million U.S. workers and earns $229 billion a year. Of the 122,000 American businesses that make up this industry, 92% are small businesses that employ fewer than 10 people. The film industry produces a $15.3 billion trade surplus, more than each of the telecommunications, transportation, insurance, or health care sectors.”
Vitale emphasizes that AI is and will be a major concern to this industry. As there are concerns about piracy and copyright and trademark infringement, I expect that this will attract a huge movement against AI and a boycott of the major and minor businesses involved in film and television. Of course, when one says “film business” they are referring to the past. The current trend is a digital business and the process is streaming. There will be a fight, and it will get ugly. Why? Because rogue AI will make piracy and copyright legitimate by disrupting an American apple pie movie business that has since the early 2000s gone sour due to algorithms and poor residuals to artists.
A good source of information is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s 2020 Piracy Landscape Study, authored by Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith, and Rahul Telang as noted below.
“As with physical piracy, government and industry studies suggest that there is substantial economic harm from digital piracy. For example, Blackburn et al. (2019) find that, worldwide, there are approximately 26.6 billion illegal pirated viewings of U.S. produced films each year as well as 126.7 billion pirated viewings of U.S. produced television shows. The authors estimate that this causes a loss to domestic revenues of $29.2 billion to $71 billion per year, which implies losses between 11% and 25% of industry revenue. The authors also find that this leads to between 230,000 and 560,000 lost jobs in the U.S. each year.”
AI and the internet will finish off the job of eliminating independent artists within a few years. It is time we declare a war against piracy which is just as lethal as drugs.
Since we had little piracy in the analog days, I asked a tech friend why we changed our system of putting film in metal cannisters and delivering them to theaters. It is hard to pirate five cans per film. And then you need a theater. And a projector. And an audience. pirate-proof. My friend said it was cheaper — but it was not well thought out — unless you believe, as I do, that it was done on purpose to eliminate workers or copyright.
Film died in 2003 and every technology after film has been a disaster. Each has led to an uptick in piracy and copyright violations. That includes VHS tapes, DVD movies, and links to films. My friend said it would take him a very short time to pirate any film on a digital link. And the quality would be great.
So, why did every tech advance lead to record levels of piracy? And why do generations since the 1980s think that piracy and copyright violation is ok? Pirates now have an audience ready to sacrifice artists in a blink of an eye — that includes most of our children and any adult under 40.
Now we are in the AI age and I don’t believe that the experts and the Congress will have effective guard rails without great pressure by the people.
We are at the Oppenheimer Moment and we need to act.
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