More Australians illegally download movies, music and TV without punishment

WOLF Creek star John Jarratt has slammed the Federal Goverment for sitting on its hands and doing nothing, while more Australians are pirating movies and other material online.

MORE Australians than ever are illegally downloading film and television content – and more often – leading some industry figures to fear for the future of Australian film.

Figures released today at the Australian International Movie Convention on the Gold Coast revealed 29 per cent of Australians aged 18-64 are active pirates. The research, presented by Lori Flekser of the IP Awareness Foundation showed the figure had risen 4 per cent in the past year and that 55 per cent of the most active pirates are illegally downloading movies weekly, an increase of 20 per cent in the past year.

“There are not only more people doing it – but those people are doing it more frequently and those are both huge problems,” Flekser said. “The flip side of that, and the good news, is that it is still not the social norm amongst most age groups. It is still the activity of a smallish minority.”

The new figures reveal that 14 per cent of 12-13 year olds pirate, 36 per cent of 16-17 year olds and a peak figure of 54 per cent in the 18-24 year old age bracket admitting to actively accessing pirated movies and TV shows.

Australian acting veteran John Jarratt, best known for his role as Mick Taylor in the Wolf Creek movies, said that the implications for the local film industry were dire and that government intervention in form of strict legislation was urgently needed.

“We’re in a terrible state,” he said. “We have people stealing millions of dollars and the government is sitting there doing nothing. The Labour government and the Liberal government since 2008 have sat on their hands and watched people who work in the entertainment industry – film and music – getting robbed of millions and done nothing about it.”

Jarratt said that government funding of local movies was undermined by the fact that more not was being done to prevent returns on investment being lost to piracy. He said that after earning a tidy sum through DVD sales of the original Wolf Creek movie in 2005 he hadn’t received a cent from the back end of last year’s globally released Wolf Creek 2, which was partially government funded.

Nation of crims ... John Jarratt as Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek 2.

“It’s almost a year since Wolf Creek 2 played in cinemas and there’s still a substantial amount of pirates on torrent sites downloading it without paying,” he said. “This film took years to finance and did good box office, but it has struggled to recoup money for the investors and the creative team.

“They put money into Australian films – and that’s taxpayers’ money - but they are not doing due diligence in getting it back,” he said. “They have sat back and let the profit that is supposed to come back to the Australian people through Screen Australia be robbed. They are washing their hands of it and turning a blind eye – it’s all too hard. It’s not too hard – they just couldn’t be bothered.”

Flekser said the new figures showed that 52 per cent of Australians agreed that the internet required more regulation to prevent individuals from streaming or downloading pirated content and that both government legislation and the assistance of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) was required to make that happen.

“There needs to be a clear framework that protects copyright,” she said. “Surprisingly, even among pirates, the majority of people agree there needs to be legislation that stops people from downloading illegally. Last year’s qualitative research among teenagers showed that one of the key reasons they pirate is because nobody is stopping them.”

Illegal downloads ... are continuing across Australia. Picture: Darren England

Jarratt, who struggled to raise the funds for his coming low-budget movie StalkHer, said that the perception appeared to be unique to the entertainment industry and that if theft on such a scale was occurring in other fields, action would be immediate.

“What if someone found a way to illegally download airplane tickets to anywhere you want to go?,” he said. “Because that’s what they do – you can get any movie you want. Do you think they would let that go for too long? Imagine if you had being getting paid every Friday for 12 years and then suddenly every Friday someone downloaded your wages and then said ‘put up with it – it’s too hard, we can’t fix it for you mate. But turn up on Monday anyway and keep working’. That’s what I am doing. But then when we get another movie up and go to an investor – what are they going to say? Then what’s going to happen? We’re going to die. There will be no industry.”

Flekser said that parents played a huge role in the education process, with the statistics revealing that parents who pirate content are more likely to have children who do the same and also that 85 per cent of children had never had a conversation with their parents about the subject.

“Teenagers admit that the parents are the key source of their behaviour,” Flekser said. “Parents are very scared of their kids being victims online but the seldom think of them as being perpetrators online.”