2016
Euromedia
Content Security
Movie worker handed $1.12m piracy fine
A
California man has sentenced by a US
$1.12 million (€1m) in restitution to Twentieth
Federal Court for criminal copyright
Century Fox.
infringement for illegally posting
Morarity has agreed to assist the FBI in the
screener (pre-release) versions of two movies
production of a public service announcement
– The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie – to
to assist the government in educating
a publicly accessible website.
As a result of the illegal upload,
The Revenant was available for
download six days before its
limited release in theatres and
more than 1 million people were
able to download the film over a
six-week period, which caused
Twentieth Century Fox Film
Corporation to suffer losses of
well over $1 million, according
to the US Department of Justice.
William Kyle Morarity, 31,
who used the screen name
‘clutchit’, had pleaded guilty in February 2016
the public about the harms of copyright
to felony copyright infringement and has now
infringement and the illegal uploading of
been sentenced
movies that are the
by United States
“The fact that the defendant stole legal property of the
District Court
these films while working on the movie studio.
Judge Stephen V.
Morarity obtained
lot of a movie studio makes his
Wilson to eight
the screeners without
crime more egregious.”
months’ home
authorisation while
detention and 24
at work on a studio
months’ probation. He was also ordered to pay
lot. He copied the screeners onto a portable
Research: Online
movie piracy hurts
sales
A study carried out for the
European Commission has
revealed that virtually all
the lost sales of movies
stem from to a very small
group of individuals, with
the authors suggesting that
most damages of movie
piracy could potentially be
prevented with well-targeted
policies. The study -Movie
Piracy and Displaced Sales
in Europe: Evidence from Six
Countries – by Benedikt Herz
and Kamil Kiljansk, estimates
lost movie sales as a result of
movie piracy in Europe.
They found that for a
sample of the Internet-using
population in six major
European countries one unit
of (first) unpaid consumption
displaces around 0.42 units
of (first) paid consumption.
For movies that are seen
more than twice, first
unpaid consumption slightly
increases paid second
consumption. “Since the
sampling effect is very small,
the overall effect of unpaid
movie consumption on movie
sales is clearly negative:
during the time horizon we
study, we find that unpaid
consumption reduced movie
sales by about 4.4%,” they
report.
drive and uploaded the movies from his home
computer on December 17 and 19, 2015, to a
BitTorrent website, Pass the Popcorn, which
allowed downloading via a peer-to-peer
network.
“The film industry
creates thousands of jobs
in Southern California,”
said United States Attorney
Eileen M. Decker. “The
defendant’s illegal conduct
caused significant harm to
the victim movie studio.
The fact that the defendant
stole these films while
working on the lot of a
movie studio makes his
crime more egregious.”
“Morarity used his
position of trust to gain access to sensitive
intellectual property, then shared that content
online and incurred large-scale losses to the
owner of that property,” said Deirdre Fike, the
Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los
Angeles Field Office. “The theft of intellectual
property - in this case, major motion pictures
- discourages creative incentive and affects the
average American making ends meet in the
entertainment industry.”
Nevertheless, since
the share of unpaid
movie consumption
differ substantially across
countries, they also
documented big differences
in lost sales across countries
According to Herz and
Kiljansk, 94% of lost movie
sales result from to the
unpaid consumption of only
20% of consumers with the
highest movie consumption
They suggest that the
findings have important
implications for copyright
policy. “The estimates
that we provide can help
policy makers to assess
the efficient use of public
resources to be spent on
copyright enforcement of
movies. In particular, since
we find that virtually all the
lost sales of movies are due
to a very small group of
individuals, most damage by
movie piracy could therefore
potentially be prevented with
well targeted policies. Finally,
the big differences in unpaid
movie consumption across
EU Member States that we
documented in this paper
suggest that institutional
differences, especially
regarding copyright law
and its enforcement, might
substantially affect lost sales.
To explore this further is an
interesting avenue for future
research,” they conclude.