Over at the Huffington Post (which I hate to link to), there is a good piece about how Internet piracy harms small, independent creators, in this case an independent movie producer.
Some excerpts:
Over half of Internet users admit to pirating movies. As a result, broadcasters and distributors are paying less money for content. In fact, in the last five years dozens of major movie companies, including Paramount Vantage, Fine Line, Miramax, Bob Yari and MGM have effectively stopped making and buying films all together.
. . .
But two weeks before 16-LOVE even came out in theaters, it was already up on the Internet, where thousands of people were watching it for free. It was like a punch in the stomach, seeing the movie come up on dozens of websites even before people could pay us to watch it and knowing that there was pretty much nothing we could do about it.
. . .
But in that same period, by our calculation, we've detected over 5,000 illegal links to the movie, but as fast as we ask the web browsers to delist 16-LOVE, it keeps popping up again on more sites. What's more, every time we have to ask Google to take down the movie from their search engine, we must attest under penalty of losing our Internet privileges that we actually own 16-LOVE.
It seems perverse to me that the same pirate companies steal our content over and over. We ask Google and the other Internet congloms to delist them, but those same companies keep putting up new sites faster than we can ask for them to be taken down, and nobody threatens them with losing access to the web.