MOSCOW, April 6 — The American film industry is fighting rampant DVD piracy in Russia with a radical new tactic: cutting prices.
To fight piracy here, where 9 out of 10 DVD’s sold are counterfeit copies, Columbia TriStar, a division of Sony, will price DVD’s at no more than 299 rubles, or just over $10, less than half its current price. Warner Home Video, a division of Time Warner, has already cut its DVD prices in Russia to the equivalent of $15.
“The idea is to get Russian consumers used to buying licensed material, but at a price that most of the population can afford,” said Vyacheslav Dobychin, general director of Columbia TriStar’s licensee here. Columbia TriStar is setting up its own factory outside of downtown Moscow, which later this month is to start churning out licensed copies of “Bad Boys 2,” “Big Fish,” “S.W.A.T.” and other movie hits.
The low-price idea has long been anathema to industry advocates in the United States. “You can never compete on price with a pirate,” said Jack Valenti in a recent telephone interview. The longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, he has made stern copyright enforcement his rallying cry.
But Hollywood appears to be running out of options in Russia. Piracy is getting worse, says Konstantin Zemchenkov, director of the Russian Anti-Piracy Organization, a group partly financed by Hollywood studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, which is leading the fight against producers, distributors and retailers of pirated discs and videos in Russia.
A former KGB officer, Mr. Zemchenkov said that piracy in Russia accounted for 9 out of every 10 DVD’s sold and 6 out of every 10 CD’s. His numbers stand in sharp contrast to estimates by the Trade and Economic Development Ministry that counterfeit disc sales fell 15 to 20 percent in 2003 from the previous year, when pirated production accounted for 76 to 86 percent of sales.
So far, a number of leading music labels in the United States and Britain have been content to file lawsuits against Russia’s largest producers of audio, video and software.
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