Only 1 Percent of Users Rip DVDs

Piracy is killing Hollywood, right? That's what all those aggravating anti-piracy trailers that appear on every single DVD I watch tell me. You know the ones: "YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR!!!!" Man, just having to fast-forward through that junk and hear the opening bars of that faux metal jingle makes me want to open a massive DVD piracy operation just out of spite.

But I digress.

The real news here is that DVD piracy, well, it doesn't really exist. The latest figures show that a mere 1.5 percent of U.S. computers have DVD ripping software installed, and only 1 percent of users actually used that software during the first three months of 2007.

In other words: DVD piracy is pretty much nonexistent, despite the worries of paranoid MPAA types that have long been concerned that users will rent a movie, copy it, and send cheap, Sharpie-labeled copies to all their friends and relatives for Christmas.

There's tons of speculation as to why this is, but in my opinion the reasons are pretty obvious. First, as any iPod video watcher can tell you, it's a lot harder to rip a DVD than a CD. I've written posts on it before, even, because the one-click method you get with just about any piece of audio software just doesn't exist for movies. Not yet, anyway.

Second, dealing with the monster files of a DVD is just not worth the hassle. Storing a 4MB music file on my hard drive is a much different proposition than storing a 5GB (or larger) movie in perpetuity. Even the largest drives would fill up in rather short order. Most movies take up more than one disc or need a double-layer disc, too, and burning a copy of a movie takes much longer than burning a music CD.

But I feel the crux of the argument is a simple one: The DVD business has a rental model that works, while the audio business does not. At $2 to $4 for a DVD rental, most users consider that totally fair, which is why I have no problem paying my $20 a month for a Netflix subscription and wouldn't dream of trying to find a friend to rent, copy, and return obscure movies on my behalf. It's just not worth the headache, and if I want to watch a movie more than once, I'll just buy the disc. (I also like to get the original packaging, but I'm fussy that way.) The closest things the music business has are services like Napster and Rhapsody, where you pay a flat fee for monthly access to all-you-can-eat music. I know such services are reasonably popular, but it's not surprising that iTunes, where you end up owning a copy of the music you buy, trumps them all. Most people just don't seem to want every song, but rather the few they're interested in on any given day.

These arguments are all academic in the end. The bottom line is the next time you hear some lobbyist bloviating about how the movie business is dying because of evil, evil pirates, well, now you know the truth. Hollywood is doing a fine job of killing itself, without much help at all from anyone on the outside.

LINK: A Sigh of Relief for Blockbuster: Few People Copy DVDs