King Kong vs The Pirates!
p2pnet.net News:- If you can’t think of anything original, copy, ie, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Bewitched.
That’s been one of Hollywood’s guiding maxims, of late, and with that in mind, “Shortly before Christmas, Universal Pictures plans to unveil its $150 million remake of ‘King Kong,’ the 1933 classic featuring an overgrown beast with a soft spot for blondes, a craggy, fog-shrouded island inhabited by dinosaurs and a squadron of planes buzzing the Empire State Building,” says the News York Times.
We can hardly wait.
There is, of course, a BUT. And that is – how will King Kong be kept safe from file sharing villains who “specialize in stealing copies of first-run movies and distributing them globally on the Internet or on bootleg DVDs” (although Hollywood’s own home theater components are “helping to shrink theatrical attendance, as more film fans choose to watch while stretched out on their couches”)?
“Consumers have a lot more authority these days and they know that by using technology they can gain access to content and they want to use the power that they have,” Walt Disney’s Robert Iger said recently. “We can’t stand in the way and we can’t allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go or wants to go.”
Revenue of $84 billion
Because high-speed Net connections can mean large downloads, the studios are faced with the “same thorny challenges that the music industry encountered several years ago with the emergence of file-sharing programs,” says the NYT, going on:
“Hollywood reported global revenue of $84 billion in 2004, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm. With most theatrical releases amounting to little more than an unprofitable, expensive form of marketing, DVDs have become Hollywood’s lifeblood: together with videos, they kick in $55.6 billion, or about two-thirds of that annual haul, with box-office receipts making up most of the rest.”
And it’s these physical DVDs which allow counterfeiters to not only live long, but also to prosper.
As the NYT points out, high-speed Net connections can mean huge, lightning fast downloads.
Interviewed by J.D. Lasica, ex-MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti said, “I visited the labs at Caltech, and they’re running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.”
He also said, “Some new business model may want to put a movie out on the Internet just after it leaves theatrical exhibition. We can’t afford to let that be copied at that juncture because it’s the [home entertainment] aftermarket where you make your profits.”
FAST or not, Hollywood is sticking to old, and badly outmoded, marketing, sales and distribution models. Instead of looking to p2p and other 21st century technologies to get them into the 21st century, the major studios and their compatriots in the music industry are behaving like King Canute who tried, and failed, to hold back the tide.
The billions of physical CDs and DVDs flooding retail outlets around the world are so easy to copy that it’s ridiculous. Counterfeiters and duplicators snap them up and hours later, faithful copies, often complete with look-alike packaging, are being peddled on street corners and in flea-markets. DRM? Forget it. The only people ‘copyright protection’ impresses are the mainscream media.
And despite many examples of creative accounting and imaginative reports, neither the labels nor the studios have ever been able to prove a shared file equals even a single a lost sale. Nonetheless, the cartels continue to claim they and their millionaire stars and support works are suffering terrible financial and personal hardships because of file sharing, which they try to link with ‘piracy,’ as they’ve dubbed the practice of copying and re-selling their product, although there’s nary an ocean in sight.
‘Hard-core criminals’
“The packaging and distribution of bootleg DVDs takes place in a number of far-flung locations,” says the NYT, naming the US, China, Russia, Britain, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and the Philippines as “hot spots”.
And, “At the heart of this network, according to federal investigators and analysts, are cybergeeks who fashion themselves as digital Robin Hoods, stealing from rich studios and giving film fans a free ride. Operating alongside them are hard-core criminals who have the money and connections to efficiently hijack and distribute films within hours of – and sometimes even before – a theatrical premiere.”
And, “Sitting comfortably in the darkness of a theater, a team of four ‘cammers’ goes to work. One sits apart from the group and acts as a lookout, while another unfolds a small digital video camera hidden inside his clothing and records whatever movie is rolling across the screen. The two other members of the team are planted in front of the person doing the recording, trying to keep the path clear of those blackened silhouettes that pop up in the frames of many bootleg films.”
And, “Once the movie is filmed, it is uploaded to the network in a race to see who can post the first clean version of a popular film on the Internet. According to the law enforcement authorities and court documents, the Web sites where the films are posted are invitation-only affairs that bootleggers call topsites. Most of them operate in secluded online zones known as the darknet.”
Whoa!!! ‘Topsites‘ and ‘darknet‘.
Interestingly, Sony, a prime mover in both the studio and music worlds and one of the most vociferous complainants, also develops, makes and markets a significant proportion of the mini recorders it says are used by the “cammers,” as well as burners and associated supplies and equipment.
“Once the movie is filmed, it is uploaded to the network in a race to see who can post the first clean version of a popular film on the Internet.”
The NYT piece concludes by saying p2p research firm BigChampagne said for the week through August 9, an average of 102,895 people a day downloaded War of the Worlds, “using a file-sharing program called BitTorrent” and, “In the same period, Wedding Crashers had an average of 100,134 downloaders a day”.
War of the Worlds
Speaking of Sony, it traced a ‘pirated’ copy of Something’s Gotta Give to a screener from actor Carmine Caridi, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Last Samurai and other pirated screeners were also tracked back to Caridi.
Russell Sprague, who ended up dead in an LA jail cell, received 130 movies from Caridi, who was ordered to pay Warner Bros a paltry $300,000 for providing them.
A now-famous AT&T Labs report, Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process, revealed that of a total of 285 movies sampled on p2p networks, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.
Last year Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was one of the most popular movies on the p2p networks. Gibson sued a Hollywood post-production company claiming bad security allowed three employees to copy the movie, which eventually turned up online and on the black market.
Much more recently, the Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, suddenly appeared online the same day it opened in theatres. But that wasn’t down to would-be file sharers equipped with Sony’s latest ‘pirate’ camcorders. Rather, it was another, and very deliberate, Hollywood insider leak.
Meanwhile, p2pnet publishes a unique weekly Movies File Share Top Ten based on BigChampagne stats and our TT chart for August 25 has War of the Worlds still in the global #1 spot, with Wedding Crashers as the top US movie.
But this doesn’t mean millions of people are downloading and viewing these movies instead of paying for cinema tickets.
In 2004, a record number of people visited cinemas in Western Europe in 2004, with admissions reaching 896.6 million, an increase of nearly 50 million on 2003.
And Global revenue of $84 billion for last year?
(Thanks, catflap)
If there’s something you think we should know, contact us – tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
News York Times – To Hollywood’s dismay, digital piracy is the big ape in film, August 29, 2005
use the power – Studios and Consumer Power, August 29, 2005
lightning fast – Gibson’s Passion: still hot, September 2, 2004
Topsites – The Scene conspiracy, July 12, 2005
darknet – The DMCA Against the Darknet, August 13, 2005
record number – UK Record year for the movies, July 30, 2005
If there’s something you think we should know, contact us – tips[at]p2pnet.net
August 29th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
“If you can’t think of anything original, copy”
… what is that remake-of-a-remake (1976) or remake-of-original (1933)?
As with the Ring 2 (remake of Ring which was a remake of original Japanese Ringo) …and people still go to cinema? Thnk god for Japanese movie production – every once in a while something original comes from there …
August 29th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
“boss Jack Valenti said, ….”Well, my face blanched.”"
I thought that was his natural look??
August 30th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Who’ll win? That’s a foregone conclusion. The Pirates. Wait till the USA gets 15 MBps or 30 MBps broadband & file sharing becomes completely anonymous, then game over. The USA is hell bent on protecting copywrong, err, copyright technology through out the world because that’s the only thing it “makes.” Saw a headline today that the airline industry will be outsourcing airplane maintenance to China! It’s sad watching a nation implode itself.