MPA chief Charles Rivkin put piracy front and center at his CinemaCon keynote, touting the ongoing recovery in the entertainment sector but noting gains will always be crimped when intellectual property keeps being ripped off.He spoke to thousands of cinema owners at the Las Vegas confab as the association that reps the biggest U.S.
studios, turns 100 this year and theatrical content slowly returns to pre-pandemic levels.“Piracy’s dramatic evolution, and our equally dramatic response is a compelling drama, with all the international intrigue and high-stakes action you’d see in any marquee movie.
The difference is that the perpetrators, and the threat they pose to our industry, are very real,” Rivkin said. “We have no illusions about the scope and the severity of the problem,” he said.“For us to have any kind of meaningful impact, many things must continue to fall into place, including working with governments around the world to expand our pirate site-blocking efforts, and more broadly, driving a sea change in the consumer culture that understands why piracy harms – us all.”Piracy is a long-term problem but recently theater owners and the theatrical community have noted it ratcheting up and become more pernicious with the expansion of streaming as windows shrink and clean digital copies of film are available immediately. “Streams can be ripped in a matter of seconds,” and distributed across the world,” Rikvin said.Describing the scope of the challenge, he noted that leading piracy site ‘F.movies’ has 80 million visits a month with half from the U.S. – more than the sites of Grubhub, Starbucks and Major League Baseball.
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