"Priority Piracy Watch List"

I was reading my weekly The Hollywood Reporter newsletter and I found this article on piracy and the US Congress's support of the industry. As a normal person, who doesn’t have a job one would recur to piracy thinking that it’s no big deal. As an industry professional one can only be disgusted at the fact that people really don’t understand the severity of the act of piracy.

The battle has been constant, from ad campaigns, to conferences that condemn it and now, a group called the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC) has decided to release a “priority piracy watch list”. And on top of that being backed up by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) saying, “it will help raise awareness of creative content that it is stolen and illegally distributed through some of the world’s most notorious marketplaces.”

The fact of the matter is that “Theft of American movies, television shows, and other creative content in these countries and around the world costs tens of billions of dollars and jeopardizes the livelihoods of more than 2.4 million stagehands, makeup artists, actors, costume and set designers, truck drivers, architects, directors, accountants, and others who make up America’s creative community,” Greg Frazier, MPAA’s Executive Vice President an Chief Policy Officer, said in a statement.”

Ever since Napster came on in the late 90s the amount of illegal downloading has become the new way of theft. Striking not only digital creative content, but also, identity theft, credit card fraud, among others.

Frazier continues, “As more and more people watch and enjoy creative works online, America and its partners abroad NEED to increase domestic and international efforts to protect those works from theft.”

Illegal downloading is one of the main reasons why studio heads have gone forward with highly expensive marketing campaigns, ridiculous amounts of product placement, and basically juicing the movies they make with merchandise that sometimes can border on ridiculous.

Now the US Congress comes into play with this initiative to try and create awareness with basically the entire world, so that this digital epidemic comes to a close.

I’m a professional of this industry. I know the hard work that goes into it. I love my job. But people only see the end product, they don’t see the work –hard work, that goes into making a movie, or an album, or a TV show, specially TV that happens weekly. The public has no idea. It’s hard for us, to give so much of ourselves to provide them with a quality end product, for these pirates to steal it.

Let’s hope that this initiative takes momentum and creates conscience among us.