Pirates on the movie seas make it rough for me
Unless you walk around with an eye patch over one orb and a parrot on your shoulder, you probably don't think about piracy very often. But Hollywood contemplates it every day, and now I do.
The awards season is upon us, and members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association are getting a flood of year-end DVDs to consider. Unauthorized duplication of movies has become such a tide of illegal income that paranoia reigns.
This year, I was sent coded DVDs and a coded Cinea player. Not only can these "for your consideration" DVDs be traced to me should anyone copy and sell them, but they play only in my machine. Sean O'Connell, my BFCA colleague in Charlotte, also has a coded DVD player, and we can't share these watermarked discs.
Not all studios have bought into this viewing method, but they probably will. Hollywood estimates $3 billion was lost to pirates in 2004; I've seen bogus discs everywhere from the streets of Greenwich Village to an airport store in Nairobi, Kenya. ("No bootleg," the clerk repeated, as I studied a hand-drawn image on the cover of a Harry Potter movie -- which was still playing in U.S. theaters.)
Of course, almost all these pictures are duplicated before they reach critics' groups or Academy Award voters. Some pirates get inside help from studio employees; some bribe projectionists in theaters; some use tiny camcorders to shoot amid the audience. (Those are the DVDs where heads bob in front of the actors.)
I don't mind the inconvenience of all the coding, though. If you dupe a DVD without permission or buy an illegal copy from someone who did, you're a thief -- not a rebel, not an anti-hero ripping off corporate pigs, just a cheap crook. And 40 years of moviegoing have taught me not to root for the bad guys.
Source: The Charlotte Observer
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