Within six months of being released at the box office, hit Australian film Lion had been illegally downloaded and streamed hundreds of thousands of times by online pirates.
This figure came as a shock to Academy Award-winning joint managing director of See-Saw Films production company Emile Sherman, known for films like Lion and The King’s Speech.
“We all know in the industry how bad piracy is but I didn’t have a sense of how enormous it has been for our film Lion and how damaging until I saw these numbers,” Mr Sherman told Fairfax Media.
“There is nothing redemptive about piracy. Stealing people’s intellectual property has massive effects and has the ability to erode filmmakers’ capacity to make content.”
He could not put a dollar on the financial impact piracy has had on the company’s returns from its 2016 film Lion, but said it was “clearly very significant”.
Recent research from Screen Audience Research International for Creative Content Australia shows when someone goes to pirate content for the first time, 70 per cent will use a search engine to find free, illegal downloads.
Almost half of all Australians trying to pirate content have encountered a blocked site, but only 9 per cent of pirates were deterred, with one in two continuing to use search to find an alternative.
“In this world of over-the-top video-on-demand platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, the industry is being disrupted and it’s important for the government to look at the best way of protecting it. Piracy is absolutely up there as one of the top concerns,” he said.
“Websites need to be responsible global citizens and facilitating crime is not good for anybody except criminals,” he said.
A Deloitte report released on Wednesday, commissioned by Screen Producers Australia, reported signs the screen industry is starting to “struggle”.
More than 40 per cent of production companies with revenues below $1 million recorded a loss in 2017, with 22 per cent overall making a loss. About half made a “small” profit, with a third of businesses saying their margins had narrowed in recent years.
Almost one in 10 of all surveyed production businesses were concerned about solvency within the next five years.
But while piracy was among the concerns cited by screen professionals, with 17 per cent describing it as a challenge, it was seen as the lesser of the evils.
Fears about the impact of broadcaster bargaining power, high labour costs, government tax policies, international competition and competition from subscription platforms trumped piracy as a concern by significant margins.
Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke and chairman of Creative Content Australia is an anti-piracy campaigner who has been outspoken against Google for not pre-emptively removing suspected pirate sites. He describes piracy as “devastating” the film industry, leads Australians to unsafe websites and acts as a “threat” tothe viability of creating local content.
As a film distributor he said they had “empty desks everywhere … we can’t compete with stolen goods being sold for free”.
The push against piracy from the film industry comes at a time when the government is undertaking a review of copyright legislation, including expanding safe harbour rules for universities, schools and libraries on Wednesday. It’s understood some in the creative industry do not want similar protections, which also exist for telecommunications companies, to be extended to tech platforms like Google.
Mr Burke’s submission to the review specifically pointed to 331,000 illegal downloads of Lion and 600,000 likely streams, describing it as a “direct loss of revenue to the production company and the tax office”.
A Google spokesman said the platform had demoted 65,000 websites globally and continue to demote more each week, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting piracy globally.
“Google uses the information it receives through the copyright takedown process to demote sites for which it has received a sufficient number of notices,” the spokesman said.
“Demotion results in sites losing around 90 per cent of their visitors from Google Search.”