When the director of a recent feature film wanted to get some insight into how piracy was affecting his product, he asked one of our staffers to troll the murkier backwaters of the Internet to see 1) if his film was available, 2) whether it had come from the hand-delivered, always-guarded screener DVDs or from camcorders, and 3) what the quality was like. It didn't take long to find the film, a poor camcorded job complete with heads in the picture and stereo sound. The director was philosophical. "Well, at least they didn't get it from the DVDs," he said.
The quality difference between a screener DVD and a film taped directly off the screen in a local cineplex is huge. Unless you like head shots and crowd noise in your films, camcorded films in no way approximate the experience of watching a legal version in the theater or on the DVD player. Still, according to MPAA boss Dan Glickman, these camcorder versions form the basis for 90 percent of all street and Internet piracy. What's more, half of all Hollywood camcorder rips take place in New York, according to the always-reliable industry reports. That's why Glickman, NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker, and actress/writer Tina Fey were all on hand today to promote a new state bill called the Piracy Protection Act.
Sure, it's a horrible name (no one realized that it sounds like a bill to protect piracy?), but it's yet another in New York's string of attempts to boost the movie and TV businesses that work there. The PPA would make illegal recording a misdemeanor, rather than just a fineable offense. First-time offenders could spend up to a year in jail and face a $1,000 fine. Repeat offenders would be charged as felons. According to New York's Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, the moves are designed to crack down on "illegal crime syndicates" that profit from the making and distribution of illegal recordings.
In addition, the law would set up a Special Assistant Attorney General charged with coordinating state and local efforts against film piracy. Befitting the emphasis on organized crime, the new assistant will work with New York's Organized Crime Task Force.
"New York has become the hub for a criminal network dedicated to film piracy," said Attorney General Cuomo at a press conference announcing the new bill. "The wide distribution of pirated films originating from New York costs our state vital economic resources, including thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue. We are all paying a price for the leniency given to this type of organized crime, and I will not let it continue on my watch."
Down in front!
The announcement was backed by a host of media and political insiders. Tina Fey, who both acts in and writes for 30 Rock on NBC, reminded listeners that "when you buy a DVD, you should not be able to see the heads of people watching it in a movie theater at the bottom of the screen." The Senate Majority Leader, Joseph L. Bruno, said, "When someone participates in multimedia piracy, they are stealing from artists and hurting the entertainment industry that is such a large part of New York's economy." (Ed. note: "Multimedia piracy"? Are dial-up connections and double-speed CD-ROM drives involved?)
There's certainly nothing to defend about the practice of making camcorder rips, so more power to New York if the state can put a dent in the practice and cut off its links to organized crime. If organized crime is really "organized," though, it will no doubt just outsource its ripping operations to states and countries where penalties are less and enforcement is lax.
The MPAA, though, is out to get pirates wherever they travel. John Malcolm, who heads the group's antipiracy operations, recently told us that the MPAA operates in more than 50 countries. While the group hopes to shut down the key sources of camcorder rips, it also expends significant energy and resources going after burning labs in China, Russia, and Malaysia. With the move to Internet piracy, though, everything gets harder: a single film rip from DVD or camcorder plus a BitTorrent client can bypass even sophisticated antipiracy operations.
That's why maintaining tight control on screener DVDs and on the staff at replication facilities is so crucial; camcorder rips might be hard to control, might be easy to do, and might prove easy to find, but the quality is fairly dire. While they might suffice for those too cheap to buy or rent a film anyway, such rips aren't of much use to anyone who has invested more than a couple hundred bucks in an entertainment center.