On Monday, Suresh Balaje, co-producer of Kamal Haasan’s Papanasam , gave a written complaint to Chennai City Police on how illegal downloads of the movie were available freely on the net merely three days of the film’s release.
“We were informed that the movie has been uploaded online illegally on many sites. Both good prints and not-so-good prints are available. Frankly, this is an issue which even Hollywood is struggling with, but if the government takes swift action, it might help the movie producers,” he says.
With more than a 1,000 movies releasing over 52 weeks and close to 90,000 book titles published a year, there is a huge boom in the media and entertainment industry in India, but a significant portion of it is being offset due to piracy, says a 2014 FICCI-KPMG study.
The grey market shaves off Rs. 1,310 crore nationally, out of which the box office suffers at least 12 per cent of its revenue loss, while the home video market loses close to 55 per cent of its revenue.
In the Tamil film industry, 30 to 40 per cent of the box office revenue is lost due to piracy, say industry sources.
Definition problem
The study says that prevention of piracy is being rendered impossible because of the absence of a compact definition of the word ‘piracy’. Due to the loose definition, the report purports that ‘counterfeiting’ will only qualify as infringement of copyright and not as theft/criminal breach of trust.
Furthermore, the report identifies that the problem lies in how the law says that ‘no physical ‘good’ is being fraudulently imitated and sold in the broadcasting sector’.
