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Piracy costs $1.37 billion/6,100 jobs a year: AFACT

A new report commissioned by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has found that the economic impact of film piracy equated to $1.37 billion and 6,100 jobs lost over a 12-month period.

“The IPSOS research tells us that movie theft has a destructive impact not just on the film industry, but the economic damage also reverberates through our entire community,” said AFACT executive director Neil Gane. The announcement was made on the set of Stephan Elliott’s upcoming comedy A Few Best Men in Sydney. Producer Antonia Barnard said she hoped that, when released, “people will choose to see the film as it is intended to be seen – on the big screen –or that they choose to buy or rent a DVD legally rather than viewing it online via illegal downloads”.

The main findings were:

1. Allowing for effects on other industries, $1.37 billion in revenue and 6,100 jobs were lost across the entire economy.
2. Tax losses to movie piracy amounted to $193 million.
3. Direct consumer spending losses to the movie industry, ie. cinema owners, local distributors, producers and retailers amounted to $575 million.
4. A third of the Australian adult population has participated in some form of movie theft (downloading, streaming, buying counterfeit, borrowing unauthorized, burning).
5. 92 million pirated movies were estimated to have been viewed or obtained within this period.

Source: AFACT

The telephone survey of 3,500  adults was undertaken by IPSOS and Oxford Economics during July and August 2010, and it’s the first of its kind since 2005.

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