బాలీవుడ్.... పైరసీ

At a Video Store near you…
The rabid infestation of the cancer known as piracy has completely devalued each and every film, big and small, and ultimately killed the experience of watching a film on DVD. Now every film from Billu Barber to Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge, from Delhi-6 to Jai Veeru (yes I know that film JUST released in theaters this weekend!) is sitting on the counters of the video stores in a poor quality, washed out pirate copy.
The stores here in Vancouver sell (not rent, sell) these crap quality copies of pirated DVD ripoffs 3 for $10.00, so of course 95% of the customers, who view these films as nothing more than time-pass (and yet they buy every freakin one: for that price why not? If its crap just toss it or worse, give it to a friend to they can save that $3.00 and put it towards their next meal deal at McD’s!) clamor to get their three for that week. Some even come a few times a week. This is even worse than the previous trend of stores having monthly memberships where one could rent up to 20 movies a month for only $10.00. We have sunk to an all-time low.
The clients are not to blame: they go with the cheapest most conveniently available option. They don’t give a shit, because for them buying 3 films for $10.00 is better than spending anywhere from $25 to $50 on taking their family out to the theater. Why bother anyways? When the latest Hindi film playing in the cinema receives bad reviews, audiences rush to the video stores because, even if its not worth watching in theaters, they still want to see it. The other issue of course being who the hell’s going to buy original DVDs when they can get a cheap ass disposable copy instead?
Given that the vast majority of their customers have seen the shitty pirated copies, video stores have little to no incentive to purchase the originals of the smaller films or the ones that flopped badly when they do release on DVD. Only the big films are purchased, and that too only a handful of copies. And so the vicious cycle is further perpetuated.
The sad truth, and yes I know we all know this but I still think it needs to be stated, is that none of the revenues from these pirated DVD’s go to the Distributor who paid for the films rights and are getting ripped off, and so the Distributors thus have to purchase these rights at a lower price from the films producers, who, no matter how good or bad their films may be, are still entitled to the royalties earned from their film being released on DVD. The whole damn industry suffers as a direct result.
So how much money is the film industry losing because of piracy? The production houses (big and small scale), the independent producers, the various distributors and the exhibitors world wide, how much are they losing because of this racket? Well, I did a bit of research and found this article , for which there’s also a video post, and was shocked to learn that "Industry estimates say this means more than 400 million dollars in revenue loss for India’s entertainment industry". Could that be right? $400 Million?? That’s mind-boggling!
So what can be done about this? I may be quite ignorant in this matter, but what’s stopping the major distributors like UTV Motion Pictures or Eros Entertainment, or even the smaller ones like Rainbow films or others like them, from outsourcing a small third party company to go out to these stores and confiscate any pirated DVD’s? (There are over 60 video stores in Vancouver and surrounding cities alone, can you imagine how many pirated discs are out there right now??) Heck, they could get they same guys to distribute the official copies upon release. That way, the video store owners have someone auditing them regularly and ensuring that the stores don’t carry pirated DVD’s while at the same time promoting films when they do come out on DVD.
This is not all that costly of an option; its effective, and above all else it has many obvious benefits. It would kill piracy at the local level, forcing video stores to purchase and rent out only the officially released copies. This in itself would help distributors regain a huge portion of their currently lost revenues. It would better promote films, both on DVD and in cinemas, again leading to regaining lost revenues and also increasing the value of every film. It would eliminate the bulk-buying of films and thus customers would have to pay to rent each film (the way they do at Blockbuster and other mainstream video stores), so they would be more selective and thus again value the better films even more. And of course, audiences would no longer be subjected to poor quality, pixelated, washed out and sometimes even incomplete DVD copies of Indian films. Again, by watching the film on a crisp, clear high quality DVD, it ups the value of each film and especially the good ones.
Why someone hasn’t taken the initiative yet and cleaned up this mess is beyond me. But someone needs to step up and create a system to battle this disease, this infestation, because its eating away our beloved industry and its devaluing our favorite films on a weekly basis.
I don’t know if its gotten this bad everywhere or if its just in my part of the world. Would really, really like to know, so please everyone provide some sort of feedback on this. And of course, suggest ways on how we, in our own cities, can help battle piracy.