James Delahunty
5 May 2005 10:04
If you can recall, the Motion Picture Association of America has been filing lawsuits against file sharers all over the United States and pushing for BitTorrent sites to be shut down because they claimed they were losing potentially billions of dollars in revenue. However, Hollywood had an amazing year in 2004. Worldwide revenues from cinema tickets, videos and DVD sales, as well as television rights, reached a whopping $44.8bn (£24bn) last year, up 9 percent from 2003.
Record DVD sales were the cause of the massive profits, with a 46 percent rise in sales worldwide (14 percent in United States). The only fall was ticket sales outside the United States, which fell by a tiny 1 percent. These figures have come from the Motion Picture Association. The MPAA's legal action Internet piracy began at the end of 2004.
Several BitTorrent sites have been shut down ever since then and many file sharers have been sued in the United States. If any damage is to be done to the movie industry's revenue in 2005, perhaps they have only themselves to blame for bringing movie downloads right to the media and alerting more and more people about it.
Source:
Guardian