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Hollywood's war on piracy
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News
Hollywood gets it.
The big movie studios are moving aggressively to stop online piracy of feature films, while simultaneously looking at ways to tap the Internet for legitimate distribution.
Last week, the studios took a symbolically crucial step: They collectively agreed to stop sending out ``screener'' discs and tapes to judges for the Academy Awards and other Hollywood beauty contests.
Screeners, on DVD or VHS videotape, often go out as soon as a movie premieres in theaters -- months before being commercially released to the home and rental markets. Certain parts of the world, such as China, are now awash in pirated movies that occasionally display notices on the screen meant for judges, such as ``For Your Consideration.''
The powerful Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, made a very smart move in organizing the screener ban. Hollywood insiders are screaming foul -- they'll need to leave the house now to visit movie theaters or private screening rooms if they want to vote on the Oscars -- but the MPAA recognized the industry can't ask others to crack down if it won't clean its own house first.
``We know these screeners are a small part of piracy, but I aim to close every kind of hole in the dike I can find,'' said MPAA President Jack Valenti, one of the best-connected and most veteran lobbyists in Washington, D.C., in an interview with the Associated Press.
Hollywood has good reason to be afraid, thanks to a long-running preview of coming attractions provided by the music industry and its trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA.
The big record labels did just about everything wrong in responding to online piracy of music: They waited too long to take legal action, didn't make a persuasive case to the public that piracy is wrong, and dragged their feet in offering consumers legitimate alternatives for buying music online.
Sales of music on compact discs are now plummeting, as millions of Americans regularly use online swapping services such as Kazaa and Grokster to download and share music for which they don't pay a dime. As a result, the RIAA on Sept. 8 had to take the unappetizing step of suing 261 people around the United States -- arguably an effective tool in spreading the message that online piracy is wrong and can have negative consequences, but not a good way to retain the love and admiration of customers.
Hollywood has the huge advantage of following about five years behind the music industry, with online piracy of movies about where music piracy was before the arrival of the now-defunct Napster turned the occasional activity of renegade college students into a national pastime.
The biggest limitation for now is technical. Pirated movies are such big files that you need a high-speed Internet connection to get them, and 80 percent of U.S. households still don't have cable modem or DSL service. Nor is there yet a single swapping site that's widely recognized as the place to get free movies, although pirated titles aren't hard to find today through Kazaa or a rival service called EDonkey.
In testimony Tuesday before Congress, the MPAA's Valenti said, ``An outside research group has estimated that 400,000 to 600,000 films are being illegally abducted every day. We know this will increase exponentially in the future.''
Lessons have clearly been learned, as Valenti declared: ``I am determined to join with my (Hollywood) colleagues in making it plain that we will not allow the movie industry to suffer the pillaging that has been inflicted on the music industry. . . . We must counter these attacks NOW with all the resolve and imagination we can summon. To remain mute, inert, to casually attend the theft of our movies would be a blunder too dumb to comprehend.''
While the ban on screeners made headlines within the entertainment world, Hollywood has taken bigger steps in recent weeks. Among them:
• Launched a public education campaign complete with Web site (www.respectcopyrights.org), TV commercials and lesson plans for middle-school students -- in cooperation with Junior Achievement -- called ``Digital Citizenship.''
• Supported, or at least not opposed, online rental of DVDs and sale of downloadable movies through sites such as Netflix, CinemaNow and Movielink. Last week, Walt Disney began an innovative service called Moviebeam that uses TV broadcasts to send pay-per-view movies to a hard disk in a box on top of subscribers' television sets.
• Organized through the MPAA to start what Valenti calls ``technology research.'' In other words, he explained, ``We aim to enlist the finest brains of the best in the high technology field to develop technological measures and means to baffle piracy.''
It's too soon to say whether online movie piracy will ever become as big as music swapping. For one thing, movies have always been available at low cost -- video rentals are typically under $5 -- while the music industry clung for much too long to offering only CDs at $18. For another, more consumers will perhaps recognize that downloading a movie for free is wrong than would reject the notion of ``sampling'' pirated music.
It's not too soon, however, to say that I've got a personal stake in this struggle. I want to keep watching big-budget Hollywood movies, and I'm worried they'll stop coming if enough people cheat the system.
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News
Hollywood gets it.
The big movie studios are moving aggressively to stop online piracy of feature films, while simultaneously looking at ways to tap the Internet for legitimate distribution.
Last week, the studios took a symbolically crucial step: They collectively agreed to stop sending out ``screener'' discs and tapes to judges for the Academy Awards and other Hollywood beauty contests.
Screeners, on DVD or VHS videotape, often go out as soon as a movie premieres in theaters -- months before being commercially released to the home and rental markets. Certain parts of the world, such as China, are now awash in pirated movies that occasionally display notices on the screen meant for judges, such as ``For Your Consideration.''
The powerful Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, made a very smart move in organizing the screener ban. Hollywood insiders are screaming foul -- they'll need to leave the house now to visit movie theaters or private screening rooms if they want to vote on the Oscars -- but the MPAA recognized the industry can't ask others to crack down if it won't clean its own house first.
``We know these screeners are a small part of piracy, but I aim to close every kind of hole in the dike I can find,'' said MPAA President Jack Valenti, one of the best-connected and most veteran lobbyists in Washington, D.C., in an interview with the Associated Press.
Hollywood has good reason to be afraid, thanks to a long-running preview of coming attractions provided by the music industry and its trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA.
The big record labels did just about everything wrong in responding to online piracy of music: They waited too long to take legal action, didn't make a persuasive case to the public that piracy is wrong, and dragged their feet in offering consumers legitimate alternatives for buying music online.
Sales of music on compact discs are now plummeting, as millions of Americans regularly use online swapping services such as Kazaa and Grokster to download and share music for which they don't pay a dime. As a result, the RIAA on Sept. 8 had to take the unappetizing step of suing 261 people around the United States -- arguably an effective tool in spreading the message that online piracy is wrong and can have negative consequences, but not a good way to retain the love and admiration of customers.
Hollywood has the huge advantage of following about five years behind the music industry, with online piracy of movies about where music piracy was before the arrival of the now-defunct Napster turned the occasional activity of renegade college students into a national pastime.
The biggest limitation for now is technical. Pirated movies are such big files that you need a high-speed Internet connection to get them, and 80 percent of U.S. households still don't have cable modem or DSL service. Nor is there yet a single swapping site that's widely recognized as the place to get free movies, although pirated titles aren't hard to find today through Kazaa or a rival service called EDonkey.
In testimony Tuesday before Congress, the MPAA's Valenti said, ``An outside research group has estimated that 400,000 to 600,000 films are being illegally abducted every day. We know this will increase exponentially in the future.''
Lessons have clearly been learned, as Valenti declared: ``I am determined to join with my (Hollywood) colleagues in making it plain that we will not allow the movie industry to suffer the pillaging that has been inflicted on the music industry. . . . We must counter these attacks NOW with all the resolve and imagination we can summon. To remain mute, inert, to casually attend the theft of our movies would be a blunder too dumb to comprehend.''
While the ban on screeners made headlines within the entertainment world, Hollywood has taken bigger steps in recent weeks. Among them:
• Launched a public education campaign complete with Web site (www.respectcopyrights.org), TV commercials and lesson plans for middle-school students -- in cooperation with Junior Achievement -- called ``Digital Citizenship.''
• Supported, or at least not opposed, online rental of DVDs and sale of downloadable movies through sites such as Netflix, CinemaNow and Movielink. Last week, Walt Disney began an innovative service called Moviebeam that uses TV broadcasts to send pay-per-view movies to a hard disk in a box on top of subscribers' television sets.
• Organized through the MPAA to start what Valenti calls ``technology research.'' In other words, he explained, ``We aim to enlist the finest brains of the best in the high technology field to develop technological measures and means to baffle piracy.''
It's too soon to say whether online movie piracy will ever become as big as music swapping. For one thing, movies have always been available at low cost -- video rentals are typically under $5 -- while the music industry clung for much too long to offering only CDs at $18. For another, more consumers will perhaps recognize that downloading a movie for free is wrong than would reject the notion of ``sampling'' pirated music.
It's not too soon, however, to say that I've got a personal stake in this struggle. I want to keep watching big-budget Hollywood movies, and I'm worried they'll stop coming if enough people cheat the system.
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I like this, they are trying to work with the system instead of fighting it or being worked buy it. Good job.
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