Steal This File Sharing Book: What They Wont Tell You About File Sharing

The movie industry can’t completely stop video piracy; but it can limit it as much as possible. Perhaps the simplest way for people to steal movies is by copying them using a process known as back-to-back copying. Anyone can simply connect one VCR or DVD player to another VCR or DVD recorder and play a legitimately purchased movie in one while copying it onto a blank cassette or DVD in the other.

However, the process is slow, and it limits the video pirate to copying only those movies already available on videotape or DVD. Also, if the movie is converted from DVD to videotape, it’s not a perfect digital copy, but since it’s free, many people don’t mind the minor imperfections in the copy.

As a result, back-to-back copying can never be stopped, so it remains a nagging thorn in the movie industry’s side.

PIRATING MOVIES WITH A CAMCORDER

Despite the ease of back-to-back copying, the highest profit margins come from the latest movies, so video pirates often rely on two additional ways to steal movies: camcorders and screeners. Anyone can sneak into a movie theater with a video camcorder and record the entire movie. Once you’ve captured a movie with a video camcorder, you can store it on videotape or DVD and then make as many copies as you want from that single master copy.

To protect the latest movies from camcorder piracy, many theaters now force patrons to walk through metal detectors, and they arm security guards with night-vision goggles so they can peer into a darkened theater and spot anyone aiming a video camcorder at the screen. Warner Bros. went so far as to provide military-style night-vision goggles to British theaters along with the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to catch any cinema pirates. The studio considered the price of the goggles to be small compared to the loss of revenue caused when bootleg copies of the first two Harry Potter films ended up on the Internet.

Unfortunately for the movie industry, video camcorders keep getting smaller and lighter. Some handheld computers even have an attachment that can record up to 122 minutes of video, enough for a whole movie in many cases. Imagine running that attachment from your handheld out from under your shirt, and you can see why the movie industry is concerned.

As you might imagine, capturing an entire movie with a camcorder isn’t easy. To avoid a shaky picture, camcorders need a tripod or a stable mount. They also need a clear line of sight to the screen to avoid capturing the back of people’s heads or silhouettes of people standing up and going to the bathroom. As a result, the video and audio quality of videos captured through a camcorder varies in quality from acceptable to poor.

That may be changing, though, as video pirates get smarter. Within hours of the initial release of Shrek 2, a group calling itself MPT (Movie Premier Team) had captured the entire film through a video camcorder and released it over the Internet (see Figure 10-2). To improve the audio quality, MPT apparently plugged a camcorder into a headphone jack built into the armrest, a feature that many movie theaters provide for the hard of hearing.

Figure 10-2: Within hours of its official release, video pirates captured and distributed Shrek 2 over the Internet.

While the movie industry isn’t likely to demand that theaters eliminate these headphone jacks, it is taking measures to degrade the visual quality of a pirated video.

For example, Cinea (http://www.cinea.com), which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff (http://www.sarnoff.com), a technology research firm, have jointly developed a system that flickers the light cast on a movie screen. To the naked eye, this rapid flickering isn’t perceptible, but that constant flickering makes the video captured by a video recorder unwatchable.

PIRATING MOVIES FROM THE INSIDE

The video quality captured by camcorders can range from abysmal to acceptable, but it will never be as crisp as a copy of the original. That’s why the biggest threat to the movie industry comes from within the industry itself. Many video pirates simply hire a projectionist to set up a tripod and record a movie from within the safety and anonymity of the projection booth.

A 2003 study by Lorrie Cranor (http://lorrie.cranor.org) involved examining nearly 300 popular movies circulating on the Internet, and she found that 77 percent appeared to have been leaked by industry insiders, because only 5 percent of them had been released on DVD (thus eliminating DVD copying as the source). Additionally, the movies’ high video and audio quality ruled out camcorders.

When a copy of The Hulk appeared on the Internet several weeks before its theater release, the uploaded copy was eventually traced to a Kerry Gonzalez. Gonzalez reportedly obtained a videotape of a prerelease “work print” of the movie from a friend, who had in turn received it from an employee of a Manhattan print advertising firm that was promoting the movie, according to an investigation by the FBI’s Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Squad.

In another widely publicized case, actor and Academy member Carmine Caridi received copies of movies as “screeners”—preview copies—to be viewed before voting for the 76th Academy Awards. Identifying watermarks on the movies show that Caridi gave his copies to his friend, Russell Sprague, who subsequently posted them on the Internet, according to allegations in a complaint filed by Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Six former employees at the Fox Cable Networks even used the company’s own computer servers to pirate and distribute software (worth more than $121,000), computer games, and several movies, including Fox’s Daredevil and X2: X-Men United, as well as The Matrix Reloaded from Warner Bros. and Daddy Day Care from Revolution Studios.

If the movie industry has this much trouble policing its own workers, how can it ever hope to reign in piracy by individuals or organized crime rings? They probably can’t.