Study: Most movies leaked on Net tied to biz
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) — Pirating movies for distribution on the Internet is mostly an inside job. That is the conclusion of a new study that found that 77 percent of all popular movies being illegally traded over the Internet initially came from people who worked inside the movie industry.
Screeners are certainly one source of insider leaks, but they are hardly the only source. The report found numerous weak links where security is lax throughout the production-distribution pipeline.
In particular, it cited such other weak spots as audio and visual editing rooms, outside effects houses and outsourced postproduction. Once films are finished, marketing and distribution offer other opportunities for insiders to leak films.
“The sheer number of people involved at this stage considerably complicated content security,” the report said. “Many studio employees have access to the final version.”
Other professionals who work outside the studios also have access to finished films before they are released theatrically; they include personnel in marketing, advertising, the media and cinema projectionists.
The study cites Universal Pictures’ “The Hulk” as one example. It began circulating on the Internet two weeks before its June 20 theatrical release date in a copy that contained incomplete special effects and other elements.
Ultimately, the studio discovered that the source for the illegal copy of the film was a friend of an employee at a print advertising firm that was promoting the movie. The study arrives as the film industry is embroiled in a controversy over the MPAA’s screener ban.
“The data does show that the screener copies are contributing to Internet piracy,” said Patrick McDaniel, a researcher at AT&T Labs. “But it’s important to know that the ban is not going to solve the whole problem, and we have no way of knowing how much it will help.”
McDaniel said it was not possible to break down the relative importance of the different links in the chain. Figures supplied by the MPAA report that last year, its member companies and their subsidiaries sent out copies of 68 titles for awards consideration.
Of these, the associations’ investigators tracked the source of pirated copies directly to screener copies for 34 films.
“We know that awards screeners are in fact a source of piracy, and the screener ban was implemented solely to help prevent that,” MPAA spokeswoman Marta Grutka said.
The copying of commercial DVDs accounted for a relatively insignificant amount of the illegal films, the study found, as only 5 percent of the movies first appeared online after their corresponding DVDs were released.
While some titles appear online weeks before they are released theatrically, on average, the movies first appeared on the Internet 100 days after their theatrical release and 83 days before their DVD release.
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