Film Courage: What’s your experience with piracy and IMDB ratings?
Michael J. Epstein, Filmmaker, Writer, Musician, and Scientist: Piracy is inevitable as soon as your movie comes out, it will be pirated. What’s interesting about piracy in relation to the ratings is that it’s somehow the people who don’t pay for your movie who feel kind of most entitled to go out, watch one minute of it that they’ve torrented, and then go on IMDb and write a review. I’ve only watched one minute of this. I’m going to give it one star. It’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen! Part of it is that they think every movie is basically 100 million dollar movie. They don’t understand what an independent movie is because from their perspective they’re going on the torrent site and Oh, here’s a list of new things. I’ll just grab the all these things and they turn it on for a minute and it doesn’t look what they expect. They don’t know that they’re seeing an independent film. As that piracy happens you start getting waves and waves of negative comments and negative ratings in IMDb. One of the ways you can tell this is that for example we had a movie that was only released in the US, only available on limited platforms in the US. The day it goes up on Pirate Bay you start getting all these comments from other countries. The only way they could have watched it is basically through piracy. Once in a while I’ve gone in and commented back or confronted them in places where I say Clearly you pirated this movie because you live in Brazil and it’s not available there, so how did you see it? They’ll get defensive sometimes…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Michael J. Epstein is a filmmaker, writer, musician, and scientist. With his production company, Launch Over, he has made theme-driven genre shorts and features that have played more than 75 film festivals and have been distributed worldwide. Prior to his film career, Michael toured and recorded with indie bands The Motion Sick, The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library, Neutral Uke Hotel, and Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. He has also published more than 40 book chapters, papers, and abstracts in the auditory and psychological sciences and has written books on crowdfunding and the logical structures of science, mathematics, and statistics.
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