Hollywood director: piracy is necessary, and doesn’t hurt revenues

Lexi Alexander has called out the industry for ‘bullshit’ claims about the cost of piracy, and says Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde should be released from prison

Hollywood director Lexi Alexander slams MPAA anti-piracy war and demands Hollywood director Lexi Alexander has criticised the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its war on piracy claiming that kids hacking film security is more entertaining than most Hollywood movies.

Alexander said she thinks piracy is necessary because of country content restrictions, and that while the wealth piracy begets for the pirates isn’t right, the freedom of access to content is.

Sweden free Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde “For every IP block, DRM and who-knows-what security feature Hollywood spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on, some piracy kid will undo it for free and within a couple of minutes,” says Alexander on her blog.

“And this is my favourite part: I am 100% certain that the hacking of entertainment industry’s security features provides better entertainment for these kids than the entertainment we’re trying to prevent them from stealing. Let that sink in for a second, then try not to bust up laughing,” she said.

Region-locking content forces piracy

Alexander explains that as a German living in the US it’s difficult to get German news, and while in Germany it’s difficult to get US shows – so she resorts to piracy, and says many people in the film and TV industries rely on it to get content.

“Like many people in the film and TV industry, sometimes I find myself in pirate waters,” said Alexander. “As an expat household, with three paid Amazon Prime memberships for three different countries, a paid Netflix membership, a paid ACORN membership, a ridiculously high DISH [pay TV] bill and an Apple TV box, we still can’t watch most programs from back home, even though we’re willing to pay good money for it.”

“I’ll go on the website of a German public TV channel in hopes of catching up on some (objective) news and up pops the message: ‘Sorry, the copyright for this program does not extend to the country of your current location’,” Alexander explains. “Of course when I’m over there, trying to catch up with a US show sets off even more alarms.”

Hollywood piracy loss statistics ‘are bullshit’

Alexander also hits out at Hollywood’s insistence that piracy is causing massive losses within the industry.

“You know what statistics are bullshit? The ones stated by the MPAA about losses due to piracy,” she said emphatically. “Piracy has NOT been proven to hurt box-office numbers – on the contrary, several studies say it may have boosted the bottom line.”

Large sums are spent combating piracy, according to Alexander: “Money spent by Hollywood to fight piracy: Hundreds of Millions of dollars. (It’s almost impossible to find out the exact numbers, but given they spent $91m lobbying for Sopa [Stop Online Piracy Act] in one year alone, we can all assume what the total comes out to.)”

Alexander concludes that she isn’t endorsing piracy, because she sees people like Kimdotcom lining his own pockets rather than being Robin Hoods. But she says that she is willing to “at least reach out to the other side” and demands that Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde is freed from prison in Sweden.

Sunde was confined for his role in “assisting in making copyright content available” through the Pirate Bayby a Stockholm district court in 2009 after two years on the run.

Samuel Gibbs – theguardian.com, Friday 11 July 2014

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