One year after the Motion Picture Association of America began its highly publicized campaign against pre-Oscar piracy, the problem is even worse.
There are significantly more Academy Award “screeners” of movies available on the Internet for downloading than there were last year, according to Web sites that track online piracy, including all five films nominated for best picture.
And because the screeners are DVDs, not VHS videos as they were last season, the quality of the copies is much better. The FBI is investigating several cases, including the leaking of Warner Brothers’ “Million Dollar Baby” and Sony Pictures Entertainment’s “Spanglish” and “Closer.”
“We take this criminal activity very seriously,” said Louis J. Caprino Jr., acting special agent in charge of the criminal unit of the Los Angeles FBI office.
Studios routinely send screeners to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the guilds and other groups to publicize their Oscar hopefuls during the awards season, which begins in November.
This season, the problem of screeners winding up on the Internet “is substantially worse” than before, a person at one studio said. In part, that’s because the studios couldn’t agree on a method for combating piracy.
“Some of the companies went their own way and decided to do their own thing,” MPAA head Dan Glickman said.
Some studios opted, for example, not to send out release forms asking academy members to pledge not to share their screeners. The forms, spelling out the potential consequences of disseminating screeners, were so unpopular last season that the academy didn’t require members to sign them this year.
What’s more, the studios didn’t present a unified front on watermarking, a sort of fingerprint that identifies the owner of each screener. Some chose not to place watermarks on screeners of films already out on DVD. Although watermarks don’t prevent piracy, they do help the studios track down the source of a leak. That’s how authorities last year nabbed Carmine Caridi, an academy member who lent his screeners to an acquaintance, Russell W. Sprague, who was arrested in January 2004 at his residence in south suburban Homewood.
Sprague, who pleaded guilty in April 2004, is to be sentenced on federal copyright infringement charges this month. Caridi was expelled from the academy and ordered to pay Sony and Warner Brothers more than $600,000 in damages.
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“The lion’s share of [screener recipients] are honest,” said Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide piracy operations for Warner Brothers Entertainment. “Unfortunately, it only takes a few to make files available that cause this chain reaction around the world.”
In dollars-and-cents terms, screener abuse is a relatively small part of the movie piracy problem. Most counterfeit discs, whose sales cost the industry $3.5 billion in 2004, come from bootlegs secretly taped in theaters with camcorders, according to the MPAA.
But studio executives are eager to protect screeners because piracy on the Internet is closely linked to illegal sales on the streets. DVD bootleggers often download master copies from the Net, where purloined screeners offer top-quality picture and sound weeks to months before a film is legitimately available for purchase.
Last year, the campaign against piracy seemed headed for a victory when Cinea Inc., a division of Dolby Laboratories Inc., announced that it had developed a new player and disc system that makes copying difficult and easier to detect.
Cinea discs are protected by electronic locks and can be seen only on a Cinea player. What’s more, as a disc plays, the player inserts a unique watermark into the movie itself. That means that if someone manages to copy a movie as it is playing and then puts that copy up on the Internet, Cinea says it can identify whose player was used. Cinea had offered to send special players to every member of the academy and the British academy free of charge.
But production delays prevented the company from making delivery until mid-December, a month after studios started mailing screeners. Even before production of the Cinea players fell behind, however, none of the studios had agreed to use them, the firm said.
Some movie executives feared that installing the new machines would be too cumbersome for older academy members or inconvenient for those who spend the winter holidays in Hawaii or Colorado. And without the machines, there would be no point putting screeners on encrypted Cinea discs because conventional DVD players cannot decode them. Cinea delivered the machines anyway, but it was too late for them to have an effect.