Thursday, October 28, 2010

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

How Film Piracy killed the Philippine Movie Industry

Critic Noel Vera suggested that the pirates should only sell Hollywood films on DVD and spare local movies:

Piracy is a serious issue, sure, but one disease at a time (or all at once, but someone better be getting paid here).

That said, there's an easy if dicey way out of that, something that General Petraeus implemented so successfully in Iraq: contact the pirates, negotiate with them to pirate only Hollywood movies and not local fare.

Alternatively, license them to do the distribution and production. They seem to do a pretty good job, speedwise (they just need quality control).


Selective enforcement of rules won't work either, because local films (where tickets cost P130 and up nowadays) cannot compete with easily available pirated DVD movies from Hollywood--pristine copies obtainable for as low as P10-15.

That's why nobody goes to the movies anymore. Watching pirated dvds is the cheapest form of entertainment nowadays.