Virtually every film released by The Walt Disney Co. in the past year or so, from “Finding Nemo” to “Pirates of the Caribbean” to “King Arthur,” surfaced on the Internet for illegal downloading within two days of its U.S. theatrical debut, two company executives said recently.
But even more alarming is the speed with which a version of DreamWorks’ “Shrek 2” was found online: in five hours. While the initial online version was of poor quality, a clean video version of the film dubbed in French could be downloaded within 14 hours of theatrical release.
“The problem is very much global,” said Jeff Mirich, senior vice president and chief information officer of Walt Disney Pictures and Television. “We are stacking the sandbags but the tide is rising.”
Mirich and Richard W. Atkinson, executive director of Walt Disney Pictures and Television, were featured speakers at a recent anti-piracy forum at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. They shared their most recent research, which painted a sobering picture of how quickly piracy — aided by the latest technology — continues to escalate worldwide, whether it’s a vendor selling copies on a blanket from a street corner or a state-of-the-art online service.
“We’ve got to work hard to try and keep the piracy problem in check until we can come up with alternate models so we can continue with our business,” Mirich said.
It was with “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” that Disney executives realized the problem had escalated to a point where excellent high-quality versions of movies were being made available at rapid speed, as opposed to even a year ago when early copies were usually vastly inferior.
“We really saw things fundamentally shift,” Atkinson said.
The change occurred when audio from films became available separately from video versions, so if a movie was secretly taped inside a movie theater with a camcorder, ambient sound such as people taking or eating popcorn was no longer apparent on these early bootleg copies. Clean sound could be downloaded off the Internet to match the video.
Further complicating the problem for Disney and other studios is the sophistication in which some of the piracy rings now sell their goods over the Internet. Many consumers are oblivious to the fact that they are buying a pirated movie because the billing is usually done by legitimate payment processing services and the DVD packaging is often of the same quality as a studio DVD because of advancements in computer graphics.
“It is harder for consumers to know it is wrong,” Mirich said.
One of the biggest obstacles the industry faces is public attitudes toward piracy. The Disney executives conducted a global study that showed that while 94 percent of those surveyed believed that stealing a CD from a store is wrong in all instances, only 36 percent felt that taking intellectual property online is wrong in all instances.
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“We’re going to have a heck of a time if people don’t believe it’s wrong,” Mirich said.