27/06/2005

A new UK cinema campaign starting in July will promote the excellent viewing conditions of a movie in a cinema compared to the terrible ones on a pirated DVD at home, to shift from the usual negative message of film piracy seen as a crime to a more positive approach.
Five trailers will be tied to new cinema releases starting with 20th Century Fox’s fantasy film Fantastic Four on July 1st, to try to reach film consumers at the time when illegal copying is at its peak, ie a few weeks before the film’s official theatrical release.

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The new campaign orchestrated by the UK Film Distributors’ Association has been put together following a research that showed that telling film consumers that making illegal DVD copies of a film is a crime, was not making any impact. Furthermore, the quality of the experience of seeing a film was stressed several times by the consumers during research.
According to a new study published by the Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness, seizures of pirate DVDs during the first quarter of 2005 were 41% higher than during the same period last year. The value of the black market DVD trade was worth £600m (€900m) in 2004 and is expected to reach £1 billion (€1.5 billion) within three years.