Pieces of eight, pieces of eight!
p2pnet.net News:- The studios are thinking about trying to stop cam-based piracy by bribing (oops, sorry, ‘rewarding’) cinema-goers who turn in anyone they see making home movies of Hollywood movies.
“We are considering an MPAA camcorder reward programme,” Bill Shannon, the MPAA’s (Motion Picture Association of America) US anti-piracy operations director, is quoted as saying in a Reuters story here.
A panelist in a “Anti-Piracy Practices Within the Exhibition Industry” discussion at the cinema industry’s annual ShoWest convention, he said the programme is in the “development stages”.
Moderator John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, “noted that such a proposition is also on his organisation’s agenda and will be discussed at an upcoming board meeting in Washington,” says the report.
Fithian also observed that night-vision goggles used to spot camcorders in theatres as well as bag searches can be disconcerting for moviegoers who are already jumpy about terrorist alerts.
Jerry Pierce, senior vp technology at Universal Pictures, said studies have shown that inside jobs are relatively rare at studios and postproduction houses, the Reuter story goes on.
Pierce obviously hasn’t read the AT&T Labs report which hangs much of the blame for online movie trading on ‘insiders’.
When the $150 million Jolly Green Giant went online two weeks before its official release date in June, 2003, it wasn’t a bunch of frenzied file-sharers who were responsible. Nor were crews of p2p freaks with mini-cams stuffed under their raincoats the people who uploaded The Hulk onto the networks.
It was down to insider connections.
Of a total of 285 movies the AT&T researchers sampled, 77% were leaked by industry people.
And Mel Gibson’s Icon company layed the blame for the unwanted online appearance of his Christ movie on a post-production house which, he says, pirated the Passion.
Be that as it may, Universal has cracked down on the pirating of movies before their official release dates, but once films arrive in multiplexes, “we lose 100% of them to camcorder piracy,” he said.
