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Film studios have spent the past two decades lobbying extensively to establish new legislation restricting access to copyrighted materials online. While there is growing evidence of the effect film piracy has on studio profits, the evidence on the impact of anti-piracy legislation is limited. If anti-piracy legislation is having the film industry's desired impact, we would expect film revenues to be consistently higher following the passage of major laws that restrict access to pirated content, or major enforcement actions, such as the shutdown of Web sites that provide illegal content for download. This paper applies an intervention analysis approach to weekly data on movie box-office revenues in the USA to determine whether the passage of new anti-piracy policy has generated significant changes in box-office revenues during the period from 1997 to the present. These effects are evaluated in both the short and long term, which allows an assessment of the duration of effectiveness of government actions. The results show that four of the six included policies are ineffective in the long term and those policies that do impact revenues in the short term often harm film studios, rather than help them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the decline of Spanish-film DVD sales and movie theater attendance as well as the rise of digital piracy due to the economic struggles of the country. Topics include the September 2011 enforcement of the anti-piracy act the Sinde Law, popular peer-to-peer (P2P) network websites for sharing digitally pirated media, and attempts by European Union (EU) countries to develop anti-piracy laws and legislation.

This article examines what appears to be the most important factor shaping file sharing: the failure of traditional cultural markets to efficiently supply the demand in the online environment. Its findings are based on tracking the traffic of movies on three Hungarian P2P networks. This dataset is then matched with cinematic distribution data of the films tracked in P2P transactions. Central to our analysis is the assessment of two piracy paradigms: substitution and shortage, that is, whether pirated content is available through legal or only illegal channels. Shortage-driven downloaders are found to outnumber those downloading only current theater releases. Nonetheless, the supply of films available for downloading is more affected by parameters of cinematic distribution than it is by box office success. Therefore, part of the sales effort directly contributes to propping up piracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rampant movie piracy has given rise to an alternative film culture. Through the viral infrastructure of pirate circulation and consumption, an active cineaste culture of "D-buffs" and an independent film practice, the "D-generation," have rapidly emerged and expanded in urban China. This essay's examination of the D-buff subculture and the D-generation movement shows that this alternative, pirate film culture has opened up precious space for an alternative public sphere to develop counter to the hegemonic pseudo-public controlled by state censorship and commercial industries. By organizing spectatorship and filmmaking through the shadow system of piracy, this alternative public sphere provides an inclusive, heterogeneous, and non-controllable social horizon for organizing collective experience and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]