Whenever you start watching videos online, what are the main criteria for those you choose? Being free or of a good quality? Ask yourself, are you a kind of person that wants to pay for videos/movies/shows? I bet you’re not. We are all trying to save a few bucks on whatever, but is it fair? The huge companies like Paramount, Universal, Walt Disney Pictures or Warner Bros. spend millions dollars on movie making and expect people to pay for being entertained, but do all of us pay?
It would be silly to believe that huge movie making companies will let you go with free internet downloads… They surely won’t. The MPAA - Motion Picture Association of America works as the guard of the legal distributioning, was found in 1922, and was originally called “the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America” (MPPDA). They claim it was a non-profit business and trade association based in the United States, which was formed to advance the business interests of movie studios. Nowadays it’s members are:
- Walt Disney Pictures (The Walt Disney Company);
- Columbia Pictures (Sony Corporation);
- Paramount Pictures (Viacom);
- 20th Century Fox (News Corporation);
- Universal Studios (NBC Universal);
- Warner Bros. (Time Warner).
These guys seem to do the right job. They fight against piracy and make “bad guys” pay for violating rights. But is everything that simple? During the past 6 years MPAA has sued and closed such services as:
Movierumor.com,
SSUpload.com,
Cinematube.net,
PeekVid.com,
Pullmylink.com
and many others. As a matter of fact, services like PeekVid did not host any copyright-infinging videos, just linked to those available in the web. Looks like anyone can link to pirated videos until they gain enough traffic to face a lawsuit. Will a telling a neighbour that your sister’s husband can make a copy of any DVD also be an infringement? Or shall you put a sign to be sued?
Just to make things clear I’d like to make a statement: I’d never download a movie and would not sell the copies of the DVD’s I own, but the news like: MPAA Sues Grandfather for $600,000 or MPAA Sues Grandmother for $150k make me desperately want to start doing these things…
The fact that Motion Picture Association of America cares about the money only does not make it that popular. Those guys still can not get that they will never be able to sue every single copyright infringer and they can not appeal to his conscience, because of the actions they take and their policy.
Here is some anti-MPAA art related to the topic:
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