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Excerpt from Randy's blog post:
"...The biggest financial backing for SOPA comes from the legacy movie studios and other old media and old money businesses. So far, these established supporters of SOPA have experienced no pushback from internet users, although a threatened boycott got domain registrar and Web hosting company GoDaddy to change from backing SOPA to pulling its support almost overnight in late December 2011.
While the 20th Century media titans are gearing up to push SOPA through Congress, we are just getting word that 2011 will be the worst year for motion picture theatrical attendance since 1995.
Is it a coincidence? Or are these two events - the ongoing collapse of theatrical and the push for a new internet piracy law - related?
The studios are redoubling their efforts to pass SOPA - a law intended to protect their online revenue stream - just as theatrical (the oldest revenue stream of motion pictures) appears to be dying.
And the collapse of theatrical attendance is not the only threat to movie studio revenue in 2012. In 2010, the DVD market also began to unravel. Consumers switched from buying DVDs to low-cost rentals from Netflix and Redbox. According to SNL Kagan, revenue collected by studios from DVDs dropped 44% in 2010. And that collapse of DVD sales appears to have continued in 2011: While seven movies saw DVD sales that exceeded $100 million in 2010 (lead by Avatar, which pulled in more than $183 million in 2010), no DVD did $100 million in sales in 2011.
In the face of declining ticket sales and lack of interest in DVDs, does the studios' SOPA strategy make sense?
Can the studios stave off dwindling theatrical and DVD numbers by enacting a new law that attacks offshore piracy?..."
Read the full post here:
http://finchclasses.blogspot.com/2011/12/studios-are-fiddling-over-sopa-while...
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