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Producers claims success in fight against movie piracy

The banning of 22 illegal film-sharing websites has succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of pirated movies downloaded in the country, according to the Association of Indonesian Film Producers (APROFI)

Hans Nicholas Jong (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, November 27, 2015

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Producers claims success in fight against movie piracy

T

he banning of 22 illegal film-sharing websites has succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of pirated movies downloaded in the country, according to the Association of Indonesian Film Producers (APROFI).

APROFI studied the traffic to the 22 blocked sites from August, when the ministry started blocking traffic to the websites in a bid to tackle piracy in the film industry, until November.

'€œBased on our monitoring from August to November, three sites with the highest traffic saw drops in traffic of up to 3,000 percent,'€ APROFI chairwoman Sheila Timothy said in a statement.

On average, traffic to all 22 websites dropped 780.2 percent. Many of the sites no longer have rankings after August on account of either being removed or very low traffic.

Heri Sutadi, an IT expert from the Indonesia Information and Communication Technology Institute, said that the drop in traffic was to be expected.

'€œWhen the websites were blocked, no one could access them,'€ he said.

While the sites have been blocked, they still enjoy low traffic as people are still trying to access them.

The ministry banned in August 22 illegal film-sharing websites following the submission of a petition to the Law and Human Rights Ministry by APROFI, saying that content on the websites violated intellectual rights.

The websites in question are ganool.com, nontonmovie.com, bioskops.com, ganool.ca, kickass.to, thepiratebay.se, downloadfilmbaru.com, ganool.co.id, 21filmcinema.com, gudangfilm.faa.im, movie76.com, isohunt.to, cinemaindo.net, ganool.in, bioskop21.net, unduhfilm21.net, bioskopkita.com, downloadfilm.com, comotin.net, movie2k.ti, unduhmovie.com and 21sinema.com.

'€œBefore that, these violators earned billions of rupiah every month from porn and gambling ads. Our strategy is to destroy the financial incentive collected by illegal content providers and educate the public about intellectual rights,'€ Sheila said.

APROFI said the sites had dealt a blow to the local film industry because many provided streaming and download video services without copyright agreements with owners of the materials.

Such a practice has reduced the industry'€™s income from the secondary market, such as the DVD market, according to APROFI secretary-general Fauzan Zidni.

In 2006, a film producer could sell the rights to a DVD or VCD production company for about Rp 200 million (US$14,556) per movie. In 2013, the price had decreased to Rp 50 million.

However, Heru said that the effectiveness of the banning policy could be lessened from the growing penetration of internet in the country.

While the government had blocked 22 websites, there were still many other alternatives where people could easily download illegal movies, Heru said.

'€œThere are many alternatives [of illegal film-sharing websites] both local websites and foreign websites. For example, the movie 50 Shades of Grey, which was banned in Indonesia, could be easily downloaded with the help of a simple internet search. Even though the 22 websites were blocked, the internet continues to exist,'€ Heru said.

Moreover, there was a possibility that the government would unblock the websites, he said.

'€œAnd there are still lots of bootleg DVDs circulating in shopping centers. So we have to look at the problems more comprehensively,'€ said Heru.

People may continue to look for illegal movies due to a lack of access to legal movies, such as streaming websites such as Netflix.

'€œThere are some legal streaming websites but they only have old movies,'€ Heru said.

Fauzan said that no investors thus far had any interest in following the Netflix business model.

Rampant illegal downloading had also made companies reluctant to release their movies on DVD or VCD, inflicting losses not only on film producers but also on consumers as once movies were taken out of cinemas, they no longer had a chance to view them.

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