Fighting intellectual piracy

Although US President-elect Barack Obama was smart enough to keep the liberals and political nut cases of the US film industry at arm’s length while the campaign was going on, Obama nonetheless received plenty of financial support from them. And, presumably, they can rely on the Obama administration to help them in their global fight against the menace of piracy in countries like the Philippines.

Major US motion picture studios lost an estimated US$6.1 billion to movie piracy in 2005, 80 percent or US$4.8 billion of it from overseas. Among the overseas losses, it is estimated that US$1.2 billion originate from the Asia-Pacific region. China and Thailand have the highest piracy rates in the region at 90 percent and 79 percent respectively.

Of the total US$6.1 billion losses, 62 percent stemmed from the sale of pirated or illegal copies of digital video discs or DVDs and other similar media. Total losses to the global movie industry, meanwhile, reached US$18.2 billion during the same period. With the major US film studios investing an average of US$106.6 million to produce and market a movie in 2007, such kind of losses to piracy are unacceptable.

Just how bad film piracy is in the country is a matter of conjecture since it is hard to come by exact industry figures. There is also the practice of movie pirates to put in as many as eight to 10 bootleg movies into one DVD based on certain themes. This makes estimating the losses all the more difficult.

But it is a fact, for example, that the Optical Media Board (OMB), has already been accused at least once of brokering a deal between local movie producers and those it is mandated to go after – the local movie pirates. That was in 2006 when movie producers involved in the Metro Manila Film Festival allegedly paid P200,000 to movie pirates so as not to sell pirated copies of the entries while the festival was ongoing. The OMB never denied the story either despite the implications that it had acted with impropriety. Commenting on the allegations, OMB chief Edu Manzano even told media: "I think we were just a bit more creative this time. We went back to the old dialogue. We really went deep inside (the pirates’ lair)."

Not that the government was not doing anything to combat piracy during that time. Government anti-piracy raids in 2005 alone resulted in the confiscation of more than P1-billion worth of counterfeit products, half of which were pirated videos and music, including 3.1 million pirated optical media products. The haul, however, represented only a small fraction of the total counterfeits going around and indicates the magnitude of the problem.

It may be that the task of fighting piracy is too much for just a couple of government agencies like the OMB and the Intellectual Property Office to handle. What we need is a fresh approach that actively involves local government agencies in curtailing the activities relating to intellectual piracy. Fighting intellectual piracy, particularly of movies both foreign and local, will take a new dimension as we struggle to recover from the current global economic meltdown.