Eye Patches, Peg-legs and Parrots
Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 1:02AM Hundreds of years ago, pirates were seen as people with an eye patch, a peg leg and maybe a parrot on their shoulder. Nowadays, it's typically a clean cut guy, with a daytime office job, and a very fast Internet connection.
If you've seen a movie, there's a bootleg version of it available easily off the Internet The quality can vary widely; some copies have people's heads in the way of the screen and a soundtrack replete with coughing and MTM chatter, others are made on professional telecine equipment, and rival the quality of any big studio home video release, but one thing remains consistent. They're cheap, and they're readily available.
The availability of pirate videos on the Internet becomes apparent when you type in a simple URL like
, and a website actually shows up. The aforementioned website doesn't have feature length films, but instead specializes in music video and rarity videos. They claim the films they have are noncommercial in nature, and that nobody has the legal right to them. When you look at copyright law in any industrialized nation, you see that copyrights are held by the creator of the material, and can only be relinquished when the copyright is actively released (i.e. "I release this video to the public domain") to the public. They're clearly in violation of that law, but still they flaunt their warez openly and without fear of retribution.
Now, video piracy is not always a bad thing. Glenn Erickson over at The DVD Resource page (www.dvdresource.com) recently wrote a great article on how bootleg copies of films represent a way for studios to obtain previously lost material for classic films. Also, if it weren't for the proliferation of multiple VCRs in the average North American household, I would say that "sell-through" pricing of video titles may have never become a reality. Overall, though, video piracy is very bad for the industry.
It's also worth mentioning that most bootleg copies of films are terrible when it comes to quality. Most people who own DVD players at this point are interested in having a high quality representation of their favorite films. The tenth-generation VHS copies or low-resolution Video CDs offered by the bootleggers don't offer much for the videophiles out there.
The only reason Divx lasted as long as it did, and received the studio support it did, was because of its high-end video encryption technology. Divx was essentially pirate-proof, at least as a digital format. In order to pirate a film available on Divx, the person pirating the film would have to record the film back to an analog device (i.e. a VCR), then create a digital master from there. Making extremely high-quality dupes this way is not feasible. The studios like the idea of having their work protected against bootleggers, and are willing to back any company which can offer them greater encryption.
Video piracy is another one of the shopping list of reasons why we haven't seen as many films on DVD as we should've by now. It's no secret that some of the biggest studios (Fox, Paramount) held out as long as possible before embracing DVD not just because of the size of the market, but also because they had legitimate copyright concerns. DVD does have some encryption technology built in, but it's not that hard to circumvent. I've found several freeware and shareware programs for ripping the video content off of commercial DVDs. They then create raw MPEG2 files on the computer's hard drive which can be used as a 100% digital master for pirate DVDs.
Using this software, digital pirates can have a perfect copy of a film just released on DVD in the US available in Hong Kong, Thailand, or anywhere else in the world in as little as a few hours. With a highspeed connection to the Internet, it isn't even necessary for these pirates to physically send packages around the world, they can simply transmit the files.
What's worse, is that these pirates take advantage of the rental pricing window currently in place on most movies released on VHS. A film like Pushing Tin, for example, is released as a rental on VHS (copies cost upwards of $100 to purchase), but as sell-through on DVD ($35). The pirates pick up a copy of the DVD, digitally rip the files, and can create region-free copies of the DVD for distribution around the world, plus they have a digital master from which they can make flawless VHS copies. It's no wonder the studios are worried about this.
To make matters worse, once a digital master exists, it can spread around the Internet and be available globally pretty much instantly. This flawless "copy" of the film can be distributed to millions of people in very little time, and the results could be devastating at the box office. This is not a reality right now, primarily because of quality issues (most bootlegs are still very low quality) and because of the amount of time it takes to download a copy of a film. As Internet connections become faster, and DVD-ROM drives become more common, not to mention the proliferation of digital delivery to movie theaters, we're going to see video piracy spread like wildfire. It will become as much of a problem for the film industry as software piracy has been for the computer industry.
In Hong Kong, for example, video piracy has become so rampant that it is threatening the legitimate film industry. Because of the damage done by piracy, the average film budget has been cut by seventy-five percent. If something isn't done about video piracy on a global scale, you can expect the US market to eventually follow the same path.
Of course, the big question is, what can be done about it?
The first step, of course, is to crack down on the pirate video distributors. These are the people who do the most damage, because they're intention is to make money off the bootlegged product they're distributing. As such, they're selling hundreds or thousands of copies, and each copy they sell hits the studios in the pocketbook. Whether they're selling their product in a booth at a flea market, or via a site on the Internet is irrelevant. They should be stopped, and quickly.
From there I think the onus is on the studios to offer good product at reasonable prices. So far, DVD has been pretty good on this front, with a few notable exceptions (Disney, Fox). As long as people can get "the real thing" at a decent price, they will. The majority of people feel a need to be honest and aboveboard, and the best way to encourage people to stay that way is by offering consumers real value.
The major film studios have a small window of opportunity they can use to reduce the effect of piracy. If they're smart, they'll take advantage of that window while they have it. If they're not, then we can look forward to a future filled with low-budget, no frills films, because that's all the studios will be able to afford to make.
Last week's quote of the week was correctly identified as coming from Fritz Lang's Metropolis by David Sutherland. Now, David's a nice guy, so rather than having me send him the copy of Twister which he won, he asked that I sent it to his parents. Geez...what a nice guy.
This week's quote is from a more recent film. The quote's pretty easy. The first person who gets it right wins a copy of The Fugitive.
Woman: But what of all those sweet words you spoke in private?
Man: Oh that's just what we call pillow talk baby, that's all.
As usual, if you know where it's from email me at
FRS Classic