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Hollywood Urged to Use Internet Downloads to Counter DVD Pirates

Posted on: Tuesday, 3 January 2006, 06:00 CST

By Fergus Sheppard media correspondent

HOLLYWOOD is losing the battle against internet piracy and should sell big box office films online as a way of fighting the escalating trade in bootleg downloads, a British expert on digital counterfeiting has argued.

David Price, the head of the anti-piracy firm Envisional, spoke after it emerged that Narnia, the film version of CS Lewis's classic book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, was available on the internet for illegal download just 48 hours after appearing in the cinemas last month.

The anti-piracy expert said: "There's certainly a hardcore of users you are never going to stop downloading, getting the latest movies, games and records.

"I think what the movie studios and the record industry really have to do is make that number as small as possible, and make it as easy as possible for the generally law-abiding mass of internet users to get the content they want online."

Last year, tens of thousands of copies of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith were downloaded before the film's cinema release.

The downloaded copies were said to be of unusually good quality and it is believed a studio insider had leaked a pre-release version on to the internet.

While Star Wars and The War of the Worlds were among the most popular illegal downloads, family films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were also available on thousands of sites just hours after their release.

Michael Arrieta, the chairman of Sony Pictures, told a conference in Hollywood last March that the company wanted to create a legal system for downloading films, which he described as "an iTunes for movies".

But Mr Price said the studios had not done enough to keep one step ahead of the pirates.

He said: "I think the tide will really begin to change when they start to offer relatively low-cost, good-quality downloads on a widespread basis. Once they do that, people will turn to those instead of spending six or seven hours trying to find and download a file."

The advent of mass-market broadband connections has made the piracy of films and television programmes as much of a problem as the illicit trade in music in the MP3 format.

Once a full-length feature film has been compressed, it has a file size of about 700mbs, which can be downloaded in one hour on a standard broadband connection at full speed.

Many illegal DVDs sold on the street or at markets are simply downloaded from the internet and then copied on to blank discs. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) said nearly two million illicit DVDs were seized last year.

Consumer advertising campaigns in the UK have highlighted that illegal DVDs are often poor quality and shot from handheld camcorders. FACT says organised crime is moving into this area of piracy because the profit margin is so high.

Internet users determined to download films illegally routinely scour services called peer-to-peer networks. These are software applications which allow surfers to trade computer files between hard drives.

The first - now legal - of these services was Napster, which computer surfers use to swap songs. Services such as eDonkey and BitTorrent are now used by many who want to download films or TV programmes.

The most basic bootleg is filmed from an audience seat and often suffers from audience noise. More sophisticated pirates may have out- of-hours access to cinemas and film the picture on a fixed position camera, using a separate audio source to dub the soundtrack.

The most sophisticated type of pirated movie is called a telecine. This involves taking a feed directly from a cinema projectionist's machine and offers the highest quality. Russia is a known source of such bootlegs.

Specialist groups of digital pirates - called "release groups" - pride themselves on their ability to put good-quality film bootlegs on the net.

Using names like Centropy, Chakra and Brutus, they operate in secrecy and refuse to communicate online with anyone they do not know. The Narnia bootleg came from one called Maven, a group well known for high-quality releases.

In some cases, pirates pay release groups for early access to them, as the earlier the film appears on the streets, the quicker the profits will come.

Source: Scotsman, The

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