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Film piracy rampant on internet - experts
It’s the
ultimate horror story for Hollywood executives —
millions of people watching the latest movies for free.
An underground market of pirated films is growing fast
on the Internet, with some experts saying illegal downloading
could top one million movies a day, by the end of next
year. “Film piracy has been around for two plus
years,” said Bruce Forest, a director of media
and entertainment for Boston-based Viant Inc., a developer
of digital businesses, at the ‘Herring on Hollywood’
conference here hosted by Red Herring magazine.
Film and music piracy was a major topic of the conference.
Millions of computer users are using the Internet to
share everything from music, movies, software and even
needle-point patterns, often without paying for the
privilege, via MP3, Napster and other technologies,
experts say. “The Internet and entertainment are
on a collision course,” said Red Herring Events
editor John Mecklenburg, “The copyright case against
Napster, and recent mergers like the AOL deal with Time-Warner,
are showing how the Internet is changing the entire
entertainment landscape.”
Viant,
which develops digital businesses for many blue-chip
companies, ranging from Sony to Hewlett-Packard, estimates
that 150,000 films per day were illegally downloaded
last year, rising to about 350,000 per day this year,
he said. “This kind of piracy can’t be controlled
using traditional enforcement or litigation. You have
to combat it and co-opt it,” he said.
The
proliferation of such piracy is forcing new business
models to be forged, Forest said. Viant has been working
with some of the world’s largest record companies
and movie studios to solve the problem, he said, declining
to elaborate.
Much
of the illegal transfer of films starts on File Transfer
Protocol (FTP), a network of private servers accessible
only by invitation, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a
protocol based around real-time conversations via computer
keyboards, which is popular among serious programmers
and computer hackers, Forest said. “The FTP and
the IRC are where the black market begins. This is where
most of the films appear first,” he said, noting
that the IRC and FTP are of course also used for many
legitimate purposes. Forest said that film piracy primarily
occurs through a “theatrical” window as well
as a “home video” window.
Through
what Viant refers to as the “theatrical window,”
an individual may, for instance, get an early post-production
version of a film such as the hit slasher-spoof Scary
Movie from a studio. A user then puts the video into
his video-cassette player and using a device called
a capture card, transmits the film to his hard drive,
where it is compressed by DIVX, a format that allows
films to be reduced in size while retaining original
quality, and can be easily downloaded.
Another
method is to simply set a camera next to a projector
in a movie theatre and record the film and upload to
the computer. Pirates also simply copy and transmit
home DVDs, using decryption methods that are getting
exposure through the Internet.
The
motion picture industry is currently embroiled in a
suit to stem this kind of digital video piracy. The
case pits Hollywood’s biggest studios against computer
journalist, Eric Corley, the publisher of 2600 (http://www.2600.org),
a top magazine and Web site of the computer hacker underground.
The studios say Corley has spread a utility that allows
digital video disks (DVDs) to be copied and transmitted
over the Web.
Corley
allegedly publicised the existence of a software utility
known as Decode Content Scrambling System (DeCSS) and
then posted the underlying source code of the program
on his Web site, allowing other programmers to copy
and use DeCSS.
The studios, including Seagram Co. Ltd.’s Universal
Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Time-Warner Inc.
are seeking to stop Corley from re-publishing the software
code that unlocks the media scrambling within DVDs.
“Film piracy is where MP3 piracy was in 1997, but
now that so many people have adopted digital downloading,
the adoption curve is exponentially faster,” Forest
said.
Indeed, the injunction against song-swap service Napster,
which was later reversed by a court stay, only proved
that fans who wanted access to free music by trading
MP3 files, needed only to turn to other file-sharing
services, such as Gnutella. Forest said the Corley lawsuit
will also do little to stop pirates who want to dabble
in the black market for films. “Even if the studios
are wildly successful against Corley and shut down 2600,
the publicity has already increased awareness and there
are thousands of sites that have posted links to the
DeCSS program,” Forest said.
Both Forest and Viant executive Lance Trebesch noted
that one way to combat piracy is for the traditional
media companies to step up efforts to provide easier
and better quality digital content. Trebesch likened
Hollywood’s current battle against piracy to the
cable industry’s, years ago. “Everyone used
to pirate cable, but then people stopped because prices
for cable service came down and the quality of offerings
improved,” Trebesch said.
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