I was interested to read an article posted by Yahoo titled “Most pirated movie ever revealed”. In it, the 2009 Hollywood film Avatar is considered by one source to be “the most pirated film of all time”. Or, at least, to date.
I think what I found most striking about the piece was the use of the word “pirated”. That something should be pirated carries a deeply negative connotation. Generally, I would have considered something pirated to either be illegally filmed in a cinema auditorium and then sold on, or, download and then sold on.
File sharing on the other hand, is something quite apart from the aforementioned. That which is downloaded for one’s own use with no intention of resulting financial gain is completely different to something that, knowingly, is being illegally sold in a flea market or locations other.
Moreover, the notion that file sharing is an industry crippler is absurd, particularly when within the same Yahoo article it was stated that Avatar had worldwide box-office takings of £1.77 billion, in spite of TorrentFreak claiming it was downloaded twenty-one million times.
Whatever your view on file sharing may be, one thing does appear to be clear: there has never been anywhere near the kind of debate that this situation warrants. Nor have corporations attempted to address these issues by engaging in any kind of meaningful discussion with consumers, who after all are the people keeping these companies afloat. For now at least.
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