The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is working with members of Congress to revive its war against piracy, association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said Tuesday. MPA members include Hollywood’s biggest movie studios like Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery.
“In the U.S. alone, it [piracy] steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales,” Rivikin said at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, during his state of the industry address at the annual gathering of movie theater owners.
The MPA has launched initiatives including the Alliance for Creativity for Entertainment, which works with local law enforcement officials to investigate illegal piracy operations. Now the next phase in the group’s battle against piracy is to work with members of Congress to enact “judicial site-blocking legislation” in the U.S., Rivkin said.
Rivkin said such legislation would allow film, television, music, and book publishers to request in court that internet providers block websites that share illegal or stolen content.
In 2012, the MPA backed another proposed site-blocking law, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which ultimately failed due to concerns that it would hinder free speech on the internet. Google and Wikipedia opposed the bill.
Rivkin’s remarks Tuesday quickly received similar backlash.
“With today’s announcement, the MPA has made its intentions crystal clear: It wants to give itself and its members the power to force any internet infrastructure provider, up to and including the broadband providers that service your home, to cut off access to websites on their say-so alone,” Meredith Rose, the senior policy counsel at the non-profit Public Knowledge, said in a statement.
Digital piracy grew in 2023
Rivkin’s remarks come as digital piracy is on the rise.
Data firm MUSO said in an industry report that there were 229.4 billion visits to piracy websites in 2023, an increase of 6.7% from the previous year. TV accounted for most of the visits at 103.9 billion, up 4% from 2022. That was followed by film at 29.6 billion visits, an increase of about 7%. Music piracy saw the highest growth in media pilfering, an13% increase with 17.1 billion visits in 2023.
Changes in piracy consumption and in the streaming landscape can explain the reported uptick in the practice, which costs the U.S. entertainment industry between $29 billion and $71 billion a year.
“It’s hard to get people to pay for something that they know they can get for free,” said Michael D. Smith, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. A shift from download-based piracy to streaming-based piracy, he added, can mean that consumers are visiting piracy websites more often to access the same media.