Warner Brothers Pulls Canadian Previews

A number of readers let us know that Reuters and others are reporting that Warner Brothers is canceling movie previews in Canadian theaters, starting with Oceans Thirteen. A Warner VP said, "Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up." Recently, the International Intellectual Property Association placed Canada on its Priority Watch List, along with the likes of Argentina, China, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. This community knows, thanks to Michael Geist, that the claim is mostly ficiton.

Re:Lucky Canadians

[Nos.]

Those are called trailers, and they're not stopping those. They're canceling early screenings of new movies.

You're probably thinking of a trailer

[p3d0]

I think a preview is the movie, released a bit early.

There's some other coverage on this....

[8127972]

... On theglobeandmail.com below:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20070508.WBmingram20070508112009/WBStory/WBmingra m [theglobeandmail.com]

The Globe And Mail is one of Canada's largest daily newspapers and has some amount of influence. Also, Mathew Ingram is somewhat influential in the "blogisphere" up north. I think he's hit the nail on the head. Too bad the studios won't be paying attention.

Re:One thing I wonder about these countries

[orclevegam]

Actually, China wouldn't care at all. The fact is, the United States is incapable of matching China's production costs, so it would be completely impossible for us to flood their market with cheap counterfeit goods (which are the only kind of counterfeit good that sells unless for some reason it's a limited supply item). As such, we could counterfeit Chinese goods coming into our country, but the chinese ones would probably be cheaper unless the Chinese government put large export tariffs on them, or we could try and ship counterfeit goods to China, but once again our goods would end up costing more than the origionals. The only reason that the US cares at all about IP is that it's our current major export, and as such we would really rather prefer if everyone payed us for it.

This is to give ammo

[jhylkema]

to Harpo to "harmonize" Canadian copyright laws with the U.S. This is part of his "deep integration" hidden agenda he's going to implement the second he gets a majority government. You know, all of those "extra" laws Canada has on the books that "hinder" trade? He's already sold the tar sands to the oil barons lock, stock and barrel.

Don't forget, the "piracy" claims come from an industry whose reputation for "creative accounting" is cited as examples of such in accounting textbooks!

Re:Shooting themselves in the foot

[soft_guy]

I disagree with you. I think that this is an excellent move by the film industry and should be encouraged. In fact, they should take it to the logical conclusion and stop making commercial movies altogether. That would prevent piracy. Movies suck. Do not cripple the 100 billion/yr computer industry that creates jobs for families to save the 5 billion/yr movie industry that creates trash and destroys families.

Re:You're probably thinking of a trailer

[91degrees]

There seems to be a lot of confusion here. I take it they don't do this in the US.

In Britain (and I assume also in Canada), there's often a showing before the release date. Usually a day early, sometimes a week early. This is usualyl billed as a "special preview" or something to hype it up and to make people feel they're getting something special. Actually it usually just means the effective release date is the day before the posters claim.

So perhaps the headline should read "Movie piracy delays Canadian Release by up to a week".

Validity Of Geist's Disproving...

[nick_davison]

This community knows, thanks to Michael Geist, that the claim is mostly ficiton.

From Geist's figures: 179 camcorder versions out of 1,400 releases in 3 years. Or, approximately 60 a year.

The flaw in that logic is assuming all movies are equal in terms of revenue.

Hundreds of movies will see limited theatrical screenings and certainly never make it to pirate DVD because they're worthless to the pirates. Whilst a movie like The Station Agent is an undeniably great movie, short of winning awards, a movie about an anti social dwarf trainspotter isn't going to get the interest of many people buying pirate DVDs.

60 movies a year still equates out to the most popular new release every single week plus the secondary releases on more popular weeks.

Pulling numbers out of the usual spot: Assuming a curve that averages out to 10 movies that make $100m at the box office, 20 that make $50m, 30 that may $30m, 100 that make $10m and the remaining 1200 that make $2m in limited indie showings, you have a total box office revenue of $5.3b of that, the 60 highest earners make 2.9b. Thus under 5% of all movies account for almost 55% of all revenue.

So, Geist makes it seem as though piracy only affects 5% of the industry and thus claims of being affected by it are laughable. What he conveniently misses is that it affects the highest budget 5% that likely accounts for a huge percentage of actual revenue.

It's about on a par with Microsoft saying they're not monopolistic because they only provide one of the hundreds of OS variants out there. Technically it's true but very conveniently ignores the actual proportion of the market their one OS occupies.

Re:Source ID

[vonPoonBurGer]

First, it amazes me that someone could continue to give credence to the movie industry's, when provided with a clear and concise debunking of those arguments such as Michael Geist's. Second, you're completely wrong. The movie studios tried to do marking of the type that you describe. In order to do it in a way that would allow it to work even after the movie had been camcorded and compressed, it was a pattern of big colored blobs visible to moviegoers. It failed, completely and utterly. If the studios put the identifying marks in unimportant scenese, the pirates cut it out of the video they released. If they put it in important scenes, fans complained. As far as I'm aware, those colored blobs aren't used anymore, for those two reasons. A video watermark that survives camcording and compression, such as what you describe, is as fictional as the the rest of the industry's arguments.

Re:A few years late, but....

[Gorshkov]

The Americans claimed a victory because they stopped the native Americans from harassing them...

The American objective during the war was to kick the British out of North America.

Not only were the British still here afterwards, you lot had to rebuild the White House after we'd burned it down.

You didn't meet your objectives ...... you lost.

Re:Awesome!

[CodeMunch]

I'm in Canada. Cuban items are allowed for sale here. It was meant as a poke in the eye to their industry.

Re:Oh Dear

[cgenman]

A bit Offtopic, but while Ocean's eleven was based on the original Las Vegas classic, Ocean's Twelve was originally constrewed as a John Woo vehicle. Which more or less explains why it didn't make sense: it was pretty thrown together from disparate elements.

It appears that ocean's thirteen is venturing back towards a casino heist movie... kind of a rehash of the original rehash. Which is not to say that the people will get any less pretentiously good looking, but rather they'll be in the proper setting for it.