The Stage

Payne’s warning over piracy threat to actors’ jobs

Published Tuesday 23 March 2010 at 15:10 by Matthew Hemley

Equity general secretary Christine Payne has warned that the illegal downloading of television series is threatening actors’ livelihoods, and could see vast numbers of performers forced out of the industry.

Her concerns were raised after a new report claimed that job losses in the UK’s creative industries could reach 254,000 by 2015 because of digital piracy, which includes downloading and peer to peer file sharing, and see losses of €7.8 billion in retail revenue.

Payne said the statistics, included in a new research carried out by Tera Consultants, are particularly serious for Equity members, because actors rely on secondary payments from the likes of DVD sales once a programme has initially been broadcast.

She said this income would be threatened if people download programmes illegally and added that without secondary payments actors would not be able to stay in the business.

“If actors were to lose that [secondary payments] it would have a severe impact on our members’ abilities to stay in the industry and stay available for work. Secondary fees are so important. If a casting director rings and asks an actor to come in for a casting session the next day but they are having to work full time in Tesco, then they can’t go. So you lose talented people and talented actors. It’s really serious for us,” she said.

The general secretary added that producers who are unable to make money from television series and films will not reinvest in new work, and said this was also a threat to future opportunities for actors.

Tera Consultants’ study, called Building a Digital Economy, was commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce and assessed the impact of piracy in Europe, with particular attention paid to the threat of digital piracy.

It found that the UK’s creative industries lost retail revenue totalling €1.4 billion to piracy in 2008.

Of this, the UK’s audio and audiovisual creative industries lost €670 million, with the television sector suffering losses of €78 million.

When the €78 million figure is broken down, it shows that there were total revenue losses of €67 million due to digital piracy alone.

Payne said: “Our creative sector produces world-class content, enjoyed by millions around the world but, simply put, this cannot be sustained and more jobs will be lost if illegal file-sharing persists.”

She added it was even more important that the government’s Digital Economy Bill, which includes proposals to tackle digital piracy, reaches the statute book before the general election.

“The research has reinforced my determination, even though we have a very short period of time before the general election, to get this bill on the statute book. We have really got to do it,” she said.