Film industry must fight copyright violations
That there is no credible figure on how much the Indian film and music industry loses every year due to various forms of copyright violations, because there is simply no way to estimate how much material is being pirated in the first place, speaks volumes about the enormity of the problem. On Tuesday, film-makers and others associated with the industry discussed the issue at the International Film Festival of Kerala and appealed to the Government to fight piracy more effectively.
As the panelists observed, piracy is hardly new. In previous years, camcorder recordings of film screenings were the rage; then came the pirated VCDs and DVDs which were sold or rented by neighbourhood vendors for a fistful of rupees. Today, much of the piracy business has moved online: Films (as well as television shows, music albums and even video games) can be downloaded or streamed for free within days or hours of their release. The battle against piracy is also one that is being fought for a long time — even until a few years ago, one would hear of police raids in places like Delhi's Palika Bazaar and Mumbai's lamington Road, which were hotbeds for counterfeit goods.
Today, online piracy poses a new kind of problem — the Internet is too big and too complicated to be monitored by any one institution or agency. If the Government shuts down one or even a 100 sites hosting illegal content, innumerable others mushroom almost immediately. A complete ban may never be possible. However, it is possible to contain the damage, as some Western countries where piracy and copyright violations are taken far more seriously than in India, show. Most recently, Dutch authorities have reportedly struck a deal with The Pirates Bay, allowing the founders of the popular torrent-hosting website to escape jail-time in return for voluntarily suspending their illegal activities. France has introduced a fairly effective system, under which offenders are warned three times before the authorities crack down on them.
India's battle against piracy has its own unique problems — apart from the technological challenges of enforcement and the sociological factors that push piracy far down the priority list, the country's film industry doesn't seem to be taking much of an initiative in this regard. Yet, even at the start of this decade, there was more noise about piracy and how it would have a debilitating impact on the film industry. Today, even the anti-piracy coalition of big media players Reliance Entertainment, Moser Baer Entertainment, UTV Motion Pictures, Eros International and the Motion Picture Dist. Association, India, is defunct. This is possibly because the film industry, particularly the one based in Mumbai, is making hundreds of crores of rupees despite rampant piracy. But one cannot afford to be complacent, especially as international media giants, such as Netflix, jostle to enter the Indian industry with disruptive products and technologies.