p2pnet.net News Feature:- A massive new multi-million-dollar anti-DVD piracy campaign riding on the back of the UK premier of Spider-Man 2 claims to link file sharing with Organised Crime, Triads and terrorists.

The aim is to, “make consumers aware that pirated copies of movies sold on the black market before the legal DVD release, are invariably a rip-off,” says a press statement. “90% of all pirate pre-release DVDs seized by FACT this year were copies of movies filmed with a camcorder from the back of the cinema.”

On the other side of the pond, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) regularly spends millions of dollars claiming file sharers are causing movie industry employees terrible hardship and are responsible for tremendous financial losses and all kinds of crime.

The mainstream media faithfully report this, somehow ignoring the fact that US box office takings are enormous and growing, passing the $1bn (£545m) mark for the first time in June.

This latest effort doesn’t explain how a file downloaded equals a sale lost.

Nor does it mention the AT&T Labs report which attributed much of the blame on ‘insiders’ rather than file sharers.

Of a total of 285 movies sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders, says the report. And more recently, Mel Gibson’s movie company Icon sued a Hollywood post-production company claiming bad security allowed three employees to copy The Passion of Christ.

There was a massive outcry when Last Samurai and other hot movies started turning up online. File sharers with camcorders were tagged as the villains.

However, “Technicolor technicians determined that copies of such pirated movies as Warners’ ‘Samurai’ and ‘Mystic,’ 20th Century Fox’s ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ Fox Searchlight’s ‘thirteen’ and Buena Vista’s ‘Calendar Girls’ all could be traced to Academy screeners” in the possession of Yep, a Hollywood insider, one Carmine Caridi, a 22-year member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Mom-and-pop ‘crime’?
Certainly, organized criminals selling counterfeits, duplicates and cracked software on world blackmarkets are making heavy inroads into corporate profits.

However, in its quest to gain control of what people do online, the entertainment industry has been at pains to put mom-and-pop file sharers together with true criminal activities and there’s a very real danger that innocent men, women and children will be swept up, as has happened with the Big Music’s sue ‘em all project.

The campaign is also attempting to achieve the same kind of spurious connections between file sharers and terrorists, drug pushers, Chinese snakehead gangs trafficking in human victims.

“One kilo of pirated discs is worth more than one kilo of cannabis resin,” says one statement.

“It is widely reported by enforcement agencies and FACT that Triads and Snakehead gangs are involved in forcing illegal immigrants from mainland China to sell pirate DVDs in the street, offices, pubs and even on doorsteps of people’s homes, in return for food and accommodation and to pay for their passage into the country,” says another.

“It is well known among enforcement agencies that terrorist groups use DVD piracy to fund their activities,” says a third.

Backed by a Trust with members such as Twentieth Century Fox, BBC Worldwide Limited, Columbia Tristar, MGM, Virgin and Warner, it’s also asking members of the public to act as industry cops by using a hotline to ‘anonymously’ report people they think may be using camcorders. Shades of America’s ART Act?

“Actions brought by the film industry anti-piracy body, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), against pirate DVD web sites for the first quarter in 2004 are already at a similar level to that recorded for the whole of 2003,” says the statement. “The value of the black market in DVD trade is estimated at between £400 to £500 million and is expected to exceed £1 billion within three years.”

What’s that as a percentage of the more than $1 one billion Hollywood had pulled in by last month?

The entertainment industry routinely manipulate governments and enforcement agencies and in this new attack, brags of its role as a pseudo police force, implying that it’s being supplied with information by the FBI, and that UK police agencies are working with it.

“As a result of leads from the FBI, FACT was involved in an investigation into an organised crime group with bases in Northern Ireland, Sheffield and Manchester,” it says.

The Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf paper found file sharing has no measurable effect on music sales and the same no doubt applies to movies.

The industry could be using the Net to market and distribute movies, music and software online at very little cost. This would dramatically cut down on the amount of physical product available, slash overhead and bring alienated ‘consumers’ back into the fold.

Piracy wouldn’t be eliminated, but it would be significantly reduced.

File sharing is here to stay and all this kind of campaign will do is further blacken the entertainment industry’s name and cause misery to a lot of teenagers and their parents.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2004 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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