Hollywood Finds a Way to Utilize TikTok
TikTok has emerged as a fresh battleground for entertainment piracy, as certain users are fragmenting movies and TV shows into numerous segments and sharing them, seemingly catering to individuals who are unwilling to purchase a movie ticket or subscribe to a streaming platform.
But Hollywood shouldn’t worry.
It may be free, but watching movies and shows this way isn’t easy. Fearing lawyers and TikTok’s copyright police, pirates are making segments hard to find. You can spend hours tracking down all the clips from the latest blockbuster movie and putting them together in the right order. Despite all this effort, you might miss important parts of the movie – and most frustratingly, you’ll find that the climactic action sequence hasn’t been released yet.
Why would anyone consume entertainment this way? Searching for content can be part of the sweepstakes. Some TikTokers say they enjoy being able to read the comments of others who have watched movies or TV shows and leave their own critiques.
And what’s in it for the pirates? They can’t easily make money because no one is knowingly sponsoring stolen content or placing ads against it. But they can grow their followers: Views and likes are their own kind of reward.
What they’re doing obviously infringes copyright, but in stark contrast to previous generations of pirates, they don’t have to fear entertainment industry lawyers waiting to take them to court or Washington lobbyists pushing for legislative action. That’s because, unlike video tapes, DVDs, and ripped AV1 files, a string of TikTok snippets is hardly an existential threat to the industry.
Until someone – or something, since this may be the job of AI – comes up with an easy way to stitch the clips together seamlessly into an uninterrupted movie or TV show, it’s hard to imagine a significant number of people adopting this form of viewing. So far, hunting or even shutting down pirates may not be worth the result.
Platforms like TikTok and YouTube do a certain amount of policing and have complaint mechanisms for copyright infringement, but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives them considerable legal protection from pirate activity. It’s mainly up to Hollywood studios and TV production companies to find and file a lawsuit against them. Industry organizations like the Motion Picture Association can’t help much: Jan van Voorn, MPA’s head of global content protection, told the Wall Street Journal that they’re geared toward fighting commercial piracy, but not the nickel-and-dime variety.
If you can’t beat them, choose them. More and more creators are using the platform to find an audience for their movies and shows, as they realize that millions of Americans are using the social platform to consume content today. Last month, Peacock made the first episode of its new series Killing It free to watch in its entirety on TikTok. (The first three episodes are also available on YouTube, as are all 10 episodes of the first season of Paramount’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.)
For studios, the hope is that TikTok, like YouTube, can serve as a platform to raise awareness and generate interest for their new films, either through legitimate Trailers (film marketing campaigns now routinely include a TikTok strategy) or illegally uploaded clips.
While I was researching this column, a clip copied from American Psycho randomly appeared on my TikTok screen. It reminded me that I have never seen what is generally considered a classic. So I tracked it down on Amazon Prime and will watch it this weekend.
I’ll leave it up to Lions Gate Films, who produced American Psycho, to sue the TikToker who posted the clip, or to thank them.
