Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Why film piracy doesn't pinch

Millions of people who would hesitate to steal a pen have no qualms about watching stolen films, TV shows

Last week a mother-daughter duo was caught stealing gold rings worth Rs 1 lakh at a jewellery shop in Chandigarh. They were handed over to the police because clearly stealing is a crime - it is morally and materially wrong. Why then is this so difficult to accept when it comes to watching stolen films or TV shows? As the Indian film industry reels from a particularly vicious spate of pirate attacks on Kabali, Udta Punjab and other films, the question becomes urgent.

Balaji Motion Pictures' Great Grand Masti, for example, was available online 17 days before its scheduled release in July this year, wiping it out at the box office. "We will be lucky if we do a business of Rs 10-15 crore in total," says Sameer Nair, group chief executive officer, Balaji Telefilms. The studio stands to lose between Rs 30 crore and Rs 35 crore on the film, which cost Rs 42 crore and 15 months to make.

That is just one film. Analysts estimate that if there was no piracy, India's Rs 13,800-crore film industry would be at least twice that number. It would have created that many more jobs and paid one-third of that money as taxes. And it would be the second-largest film market in the world after China.

The money pirates make has traditionally funded terrorism, drugs, etc. Over the years I have debated this with a senior magazine editor, a doctor, an export-house executive, among dozens of other people. The usual response is a shrug of the shoulders. "The tickets are so expensive", "the film has not released in India/my area" and so on, are some of the excuses. They are partly correct. Pirates exploit gaps - in pricing, in timing of a release, its availability, et al. And studios work hard at plugging those gaps - through wider releases, reducing the windows between theatrical and TV/DVD release, variable pricing and so on.

"Earlier, raids highlighted the issue. Now because there is no physical form (DVD, etc) it has become less real," says Ajit Andhare, chief operating officer, Viacom18 Motion Pictures. This "non-materialness" is only increasing. According to an annual study by Muso, a London-based technology firm, three-fourths of all visits to film and TV show piracy sites used web streaming.

A lot of the current work around piracy control in India tries to clean up the supply chain from production to certification. For instance, Dishoom, released in late July this year, was the first Indian film to submit an encrypted copy for its certification. Over the last five years, the Motion Picture Distributors Association of India has trained more than 7,000 theatre managers to look out for people making illegal copies of films. There are John Doe orders and site shutdowns aimed at distributors. It is rare, however, for consumers to be punished although "piracy is a civil and criminal offence", says Abhinav Shrivastava, senior associate with The Law Offices of Nandan Kamath in Bengaluru.

Most studios are chary of tackling consumer attitudes to piracy because they fear alienating them. Christopher Elkins, chief commercial officer, Muso, suggests treating "piracy audience as an opportunity". He has a point. Napster was born in 1999 when MP3 technology allowed the compression of digital files, making it easier for them to travel online. The music industry went after every file-sharing site; Napster collapsed but so did the music industry. Music listeners were disaggregating from a bundle of songs they were forced to buy in the form of a CD, taking only the ones they wanted. When the industry gave them that choice - through services such as Pandora, iTunes and Saavn - it bounced back.

That, however, is the business solution to tackling film piracy. Till its moral reasons remain, it is a threat to all creative industries. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, about one-fifth of internet users continue to access pirated music. Like all stories then, watching stolen films will remain an ongoing battle between good and evil.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik