Let's start with an amusing incident: Uwe Boll made a Far Cry movie. Yes, yes he did. I know, right? It follows almost automatically that his Far Cry made no money. What is Boll going to do? He's gonna sue you, that's what! He's going to sue you because you didn't watch his movie. He thinks you downloaded it. But the truth is, why in the hell would people download his movie in the first place?
Then the producer of The Hurt Locker, Nicholas Chartier, the small-minded, greedy tyrant he is, also wants to sue you because his movie was also a financial failure (it's not even technically his movie, it's Katheryne Bigelow's movie. He just stood around berating everyone.). But wait a minute, it was a limited release in theaters! How do you expect to make money if you don't get a wide release? (And if any evidence at all is needed to back up my charge that he is a small-minded, avaricious tyrant, here it is: http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2010/02/the-hurt-locker-producer-apology-oscars-academy-awards-news.html . He was also banned from the Oscars after trying to solicit votes for his movie.)
The Hurt Locker, despite being aborted at the box office (via the limited release decision), went on to rank #2 in rentals, and did fairly well in BluRay sales as well (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K0CL20100121).
When considering to fund a film, the decision is based primarily on the revenue to be gained ONLY at the theaters, which is why Opening Weekend for any film is such a big deal. There are no long-term considerations at all, save for the potential for a sequel. DVD sales and rentals do not at all factor in to the profitability at all. Why is this important? Well, who would download a handheld camcorder capture? You can't see anything!
People aren't downloading copies of films that are still in theaters. They're downloading movies when they come out on DVD. And despite the rampant downloading of The Hurt Locker, DVD sales are still pretty good, though they didn't even consider that when they actually decided to fund the movie.
It is a mistake to claim that filesharing is criminal theft, because actual theft is of a physical object: Someone breaks into a store or someone else's house, and takes something. It's subtraction. But with filesharing, that physical object still exists, nothing has been touched, what has been created is still physically accounted for.
The only argument that's even satisfactory against filesharing is the license argument, which basically says that we are paying for the "right" to view or use a product. The problem with this argument is that then absolutely EVERYTHING becomes theft. Did I violate copyright by letting my friend borrow In Bruges? Is it a violation that I rented a movie and watched it with two of my friends? Does the $5 rental fee cover multiple uses? What about selling items used on Amazon or eBay? Do I have the right, under this license argument, to sell my own property at a profit with no nod to the original creators? Will the person I bought Xenogears from at $60 be sued by Square-Enix because he took license to sell something that under this mode of thinking doesn't actually belong to him? The "license" argument, while trying to protect Intellectual Property, completely eliminates private property in a way that should make businesspeople cringe.
I think they're suing people because they're bitter that they made poor decisions on behalf of their media, and as such they have nowhere else to turn, as desperation has turned to blind panic, and greed is the only thing they know.
So you really want to stop piracy? OK. Let me tell you how BitTorrent works: You go on a torrent site, and you select what you want to download. You download a file that orders your Torrent program to find people who have what you want, and one full copy is constructed by constructing copies of that file. If there are more people with faster connections, then your file will be finished faster. That's from the client end.
Here's what you need to know: People upload files onto Torrent sites by ripping DVDs and CDs (or computer games/books/audiobooks/you name it) and uploading them onto sites. The tricky part is that more often than not these are the people who have actually purchased your media. In order to effectively stop filesharing, you would have to sue the pants off of people who actually gave you their money. The only person who probably doesn't have any misgivings about doing this is one Nicholas Chartier.
The RIAA, however, is much worse off simply because they know how badly their lawsuits have backfired because of the negative publicity and extremely negative popular opinion that they have garnered by ruining teenagers with exorbitant penalties (upwards of $1,000/song). Artists themselves immediately know that it is wrong, and advised others NOT to enter into a contract with record companies.
It's kind of like pimping, really. No, scratch that. It's exactly like pimping: The artist signs a contract that stipulates how much money s/he makes per record sale (usually around $1/album, and NOTHING for digital distribution outlets), and how much they have to borrow to use the studio in the first place. What ended up happening after the music industry lawsuits is that the artists themselves never got the money they had supposedly lost because of the downloads in the first place, because all of it went to astronomical legal fees and to "recover" company profits, thus defeating the original point of the lawsuits (the claim that the artists were being disenfranchised).
What's worse is that VP Joe Biden has come on record as having been drafting a plan to vindicate the avarice of these two acronyms at the expense of innocent people (http://www.dailytech.com/Obama%20Administration%20Announces%20Massive%20Piracy%20Crackdown/article18815.htm)
From that same article: "Another noteworthy study from three years back notes that virtually every citizen violates intellectual property laws in some way on a daily basis."
Great. We're all criminals.
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