The official box office figures from 2007 are out, Reuters reports:

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on Wednesday released its yearly film industry statistics, reflecting a 5.4 percent increase in U.S. box office receipts in 2007 to an all-time high.

Continuing a recovery that began in 2006 after an industry-wide slump in 2005, domestic box office ticket sales climbed to a record $9.63 billion over the previous year’s level of $9.14 billion.

The news prompts Nate Anderson, over at Ars Technica, to ridicule the movie industry’s concerns about piracy. He is careful to mention the ever growing bandwidth and ease of use of torrents and the like, but still maintains the industry’s concerns are overstated:

Swapping movies over the Internet was more of a niche practice back in 2001 as bandwidth constraints made it impractical for many. Certainly it’s much simpler now, and advanced P2P protocols like BitTorrent (combined with free trackers like The Pirate Bay) make it relatively simple. But the movie business did $9.63 billion at theaters alone in 2007, a substantial increase over 2001’s $8.13 billion. US box office has also risen for the last two years, and international growth rates have been much higher and more constant.

[…]

So break out the champagne (for the MPAA execs) and the dog biscuits (for Lucky & Flo); home taping didn’t kill the music business, and file-swapping isn’t destroying theatrical revenue.

Ars is one of the sharpest and most valuable news sites on the web, for my money, but this article seems way off. Home taping? That’s the point of comparison?

Seven or eight years on, it’s hard to see how the digital distribution of music will not, in the end, vaporize the traditional music industry. Making the argument that it will not happen in the TV and movie fields is difficult at this point. The MPAA, quite reasonably, from its perspective, is softening up the populace for the all-out war it expects to wage as computers evolve to handle the increased size of video (and, soon, HD) files.

Beyond that, the real story is that movie admissions have remained flat; virtually all the studio’s increased revenues came from higher ticket prices. Given population increases, it’s hard not to argue that movie viewing actually declined last year; indeed, by Ars’ own figures (there’s a handy chart accompanying the story), revenues have gone up less than 4 percent since 2002, a growth more than explained by ticket prices, and again it’s a net decline in sales when population growth is taken into account. From the industry’s perspective, that’s something to worry about.

The real issue is this: The companies need to get ahead of the game because it’s going to happen no matter how much propagandizing they do or how many lawsuits they file. That’s why NBC’s petulant battles with Apple are so frustrating to watch.

The other angle, which isn’t talked about enough, should be making legitimate product easier to use than illegal product, not vice versa. I can’t be the only person who’s tired of vainly trying to skip or fast-forward through a half dozen FBI warnings, and various chunks of corporatespeak text (sometimes duplicated in French!) in front of every darn DVD I have dutifully gone out and bought.

Just the other day I torrented … ah, I mean, I spoke to a friend, a friend, who in a couple of hours torrented the entire first season of a certain famous American television series, never generally released on DVD, whose movie version is scheduled for release soon.

This … friend marveled at how easy it was to watch the thing on his computer; you click a file once and the show starts. Net time elapsed: less than three seconds. There are no special features, but there are no corporate logos, French copyright warnings, or charming little discussions of how the opinions in the commentary are not the opinions of Big Content Inc.™, which are then repeated in French as well, either.

Why should I—er, why should this friend sit through minutes of corporate crap when he buys a DVD, when the illegal version is so much more convenient to use?