THE MPA'S MAGIC NUMBERS

The Motion Picture Association is the United States' largest studio lobbying group and they're the folks who rate the movies and sue people over piracy. They're always issuing press releases and "studies" about the impact of piracy but...where on earth do they get their numbers?

They estimate that the US entertainment industry loses $3 billion/year in "potential worldwide revenue". How can you estimate money that isn't actually earned? Apparently, not very well.

They really make my heart bleed with this example:

"One real-world example of piracy’s devastating impact on the legitimate marketplace is with the 1999 release of the film Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Pirate copies of the film (created by using camcorders in US theaters) flooded the Asian marketplace while the film was still in U.S. theatrical distribution. When the film opened legitimately in Asian theaters, attendance was far below expectations..."

God forbid the studios over-estimated the Asian audience's interest in this DOA stinker. Instead, just think about George Lucas having to comfort himself with only $924 million. He probably wakes up screaming: "I coulda hit a billion! I swear I coulda hit a billion!" I bet he hasn't maintained an erection once since being unmanned by wily Asian pirates.

Then there's their ten-country review of piracy, that you can download a pdf here.

Ignoring the fact that the Taiwanese film industry is a giant smoking crater where no films do very well, the MPA says that the US lost $41 million to piracy in 2002 in Taiwan, up from $30 million in 2000. Where are they getting these numbers? They claim that the seizure of "items related to piracy" went from 1.16 million items in 2001 to 2.32 million in 2002. "Based on the seized material, there has been a significant increase in piracy in two major areas, including pirated DVDs..."

However, in the same paper when talking about South Korea's market they claim that the pirates have become "larger, more secretive, and more sophisticated..." and cites as proof that in 2001 there were  3.5 million items related to piracy seized, whereas in 2002 only 232,000 items were seized. Apparently, this decrease means the problem is getting worse, not better, and "more pirated product is getting into the hands of consumers." Huh?

So an increase in Taiwanese seizures mean the problem is getting worse, but a decrease in South Koreean seizures mean the problem is also getting worse?

Could it be any coincidence that the MPA has been lobbying for South Korea to drop its screen quota system since 1999 (a quota system that many South Koreans credit for creating a marketplace ready for the 1999 renaissance of mainstream Korean cinema) whereas Taiwan has been opening up its marketplace for decades, a practice that some Taiwanese blame for the destruction of Taiwan's domestic industry? In fact, some Taiwanses filmmakers claim the glut of Hollywood product in Taiwan is keeping even popular Taiwanese films from getting competitive screen space.

Taiwan has toed the MPA line, but South Korea hasn't. So maybe South Korean piracy will always be getting "worse" according to the MPA?

Or maybe the problem is that calculating "potential worldwide revenue" (the money that the studios expect to earn based on their projections of past performance) is a fool's game where anyone can say anything they want, and there's no downside in overestimating performance since you can always blame piracy, rather than crappy movies, if your guesstimates aren't met?

Whatever the reason, the MPA seems intent on painting a picture of a massive Asian piracy threat, whether a country's seizure numbers are up or down. My question is: where are they getting their numbers?