Report: In Bollywood, Movie Piracy Is Largely Carried Out By Rival Publishing Houses

from the inside-job dept

To hear it from the film industry writ large, a certain picture is painted in one's head when film piracy is discussed. That image is of a person, typically young, perhaps living in Mom and Dad's basement and covered in Cheetos dust, illicitly downloading film after film for their personal enjoyment, cackling evilly all the while. And, hey, personal downloading that amounts to infringement is certainly a thing.

But it's not the only thing. In India, where Bollywood has often put out the same old story about the evils of piracy, and where the government recently ramped up criminal penalties for recording or transmitting films and audio, one newspaper has comments from within the industry that suggest much of the film piracy in question is specifically enabled by rival publishing houses.

According to a Tamil cinema DVD seller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, piracy is mostly an inside job. The source explains that movie companies are leaking each other’s films, as a competitive move. “People from rival production companies or those from the creative department secretly release the movie online or circulate it as DVDs to hit the collection at the box office,” the source said. This sounds like a Wild West story, but the allegations don’t stop there. Another source said that the local censor board and distribution houses are also on the piracy bandwagon. “Another industry source said insiders in the censor board and distribution houses sell these copies for up to `5 lakh. The copies are uploaded on private portals that have dedicated passkeys,” the Times of India reports.

None of this specifically excuses downloading a film illicitly, of course. However, it most certainly does call into question the industry claims that piracy is by and large harming the wider film industry. If that were true, then these industry insiders uploading cam-footage and other films of recent releases would be committing self-inflicted wounds. Doing so would make little sense, were the larger claims of the industry true.

Amazingly, this goes even further down the chain, supposedly. These insiders work with theater owners to get these recordings, rather than movie-going citizens.

When it comes to recording video and audio at movie theaters, it is believed that some movie industry insiders work in tandem with theater owners to leak high profile films. As a result, some films appear online just hours after their official premiere.

So we have multiple layers of India's film industry facilitating the infringement of that industry's films to harm the competition, all while the studio heads and government say that it really hurts the entire film industry. If all of this is true -- and it's definitely an "if" --, it would appear that Bollywood is very busy harming itself for reasons that can't be explained.

Other than to say that the industry's hand-wringing is overblown, of course.

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Filed Under: bollywood, competition, india, movies, piracy, studios