How does piracy affect Working Title, and how have they tried to stop it?

Previously piracy has moved up from 29% in 2006 to 32% through the use of online downloading on sites such as The Pirate Bay or through black market DVD's. Piracy has damaged almost all companies, especially bad to Working Title having 77.75 million pirate DVD's on the market previously leading to an estimate of around £700 million which has an effect on the industry to not be able to create as many production and even pay the production staff, this of course will effect Working Title more than Warner Brothers for example because they have contingency money to further fund other productions however with Warp Films for example they don't (Working Title not so much because owned by Universal). With piracy increasing at around 3% a year, it is becoming a bigger problem every time.

Working Title has attempted to prevent this in many ways including allowing for digital renting on their online site, in comparison with an untrustworthy site online. They also encode all of their productions on their DVD's and BluRay's in order to counter copying and there is a clear distinction between a counterfeit copy because of deteriorated quality as opposed to a legitimate copy. They create educational DVD's against the distribution of pirated material, in particular Working Title films. The physical BluRay discs are expensive to general public and almost seem not worth it to the black market.  Working Title have made deals with Apple on their iTunes store in order to link in when someone buys a DVD/BluRay you have the ability to download and redeem them via a code that you place into iTunes that you can then place on your portables such as iPhone and iPad. Along with this, we can find many titles that Working Title has produced such as Bean on Netflix making it a cheap way (£6/month) for everyone to stream films directly to their TV's at home.