HOLLYWOOD — Hollywood’s all-out war against movie piracy is turning into a big-budget bomb, with illegal copies of virtually every new release — and even some films that have yet to debut in theaters — turning up on the Internet.
Sophisticated computer users currently can download pirated versions of titles ranging from "Bad Santa" to "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." While some of the versions are crude copies made by camcorders aimed at theater screens, a surprising number are nearly pristine transfers.
The abundance of bootlegs arrives just as the movie studios have launched their most aggressive campaign yet to protect their business from the rampant downloading that has plagued the record industry. As part of this anti-piracy initiative, the studios have done everything from banning the distribution of free DVDs to awards voters to stationing security guards equipped with night-vision goggles inside Hollywood premieres to spot camcorder users.
The steps may have made some thievery more difficult, but overall piracy appears to be up from previous years, when an avalanche of year-end awards DVDs and videos, or "screeners" as they are called, flooded the entertainment and media communities. In fact, the new security measures seem only to have emboldened some pirates.
The Motion Picture Association of America says last year it found at least 163,000 sites offering pirated movies. The number is likely to go up to 200,000 sites by the end of the year, said Tom Temple, the motion picture association’s director of worldwide Internet enforcement.
A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These "ripping crews" — which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films — compete with each other to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected with the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.
Pirates usually copy a movie first by sneaking a digital camcorder into a movie theater, sometimes the very auditorium in which anti-piracy public service announcements have just played before the feature attraction. These copies yield something less than DVD-quality results. After this version appears online, crews will continue to compete to deliver a true DVD-quality version before it is officially released to video stores.
Piracy-monitoring firms say the advancing technology of digital camcorders is yielding dramatic improvements in the earliest versions of pirated movies. Although these efforts vary, the best ones come close to the picture and sound quality of DVDs.
Mark Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a Los Gatos firm that helps studios combat online piracy, said, "We have seen some copies of ‘Finding Nemo’ that look like they were DVDs, yet after forensics we determined they were camcorders." Said another anti-piracy expert who asked not to be identified: "The quality of non-DVD screeners has increased so much in the past year, the DVD screener ban is too little, too late."
The crews store films on powerful computers connected to the Internet but not accessible to the public. But their movies quickly trickle down to places open to the Internet-savvy public, such as Internet chat rooms and news groups. They take pains to hide their identities and locations, and so far have remained outside the reach of federal enforcers and studio lawyers. The Justice Department has struck only a glancing blow against this type of piracy, prosecuting members of several so-called "warez" groups, loose confederations of online partners who concentrate on copying computer software and games.
Nevertheless, government agencies are paying attention. The FBI began investigating the unauthorized release to the New York Post of Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of Christ" two weeks ago; by the time that probe began, federal authorities already had launched a broader investigation into the unauthorized copying of numerous other first-run films, according to sources.
Adding to the magnitude of the problem is the fact that some of these bootleg copies are pirated from inside the entertainment industry itself.
Piracy from such an array of sources means that there now are more Internet movie offerings than at the world’s largest megaplex. Quentin Tarantino’s "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is available in two versions, an American/European edition (with portions in black and white) and one in Japanese (all in color). Other titles available include "The Rundown," "Timeline," "21 Grams," "The Missing," "The Cat in the Hat," "Thirteen" and "Pieces of April."
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
