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Hollywood Says Piracy Has Ripple Effect
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NBC's Wright hopes the study gets attention on Capitol Hill.
"If any light should go off in Congress, it's that [intellectual property] is the strongest element to this country's economy, even if they can't see it," Wright said in an interview Wednesday. "It would be helpful to us, not that we would wish for it, if you saw the same situation with Boeing and engineering work on a B-1 bomber was distributed on the Internet. There would be hell to pay."
According to the L.E.K. study, 38 percent of all movie piracy occurs on the Internet, with counterfeit DVDs accounting for the rest.
Wright cited the example of Universal Studios' 2003 film "The Hulk," which was pirated on the Internet. Kerry Gonzalez, a 24-year-old insurance underwriter in New Jersey, got an advance copy of the film from a friend at an advertising agency that was creating a campaign for the movie. Gonzalez posted the film on a foreign file-sharing Web site before it was released in studios.
NBC Universal discovered the breach and reported it to law enforcement officials, who tracked down Gonzalez and arrested him. He was convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to house arrest and probation. He was also forced to pay fines and restitution to NBC Universal.
Wright said he is comfortable being the industry's tough-on-piracy face, whereas some of his competitors might shy away from cracking down on youthful offenders.
"If you're Disney, you probably don't want to be prosecuting," Wright said. "If you're me, you want to have that veil of prosecution out there."
Does that make Wright the movie industry's Mean Uncle Bob?
"I think we can live with that," he said.
