TYPES OF VIDEO PIRACY

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Internet piracy is just one part of the overall piracy problem faced by the movie industry. Movie studios are concerned about three general types of piracy:

Hard goods piracy Sale of illegally copied videos at swap meets and through online auction sites and email

Circumvention devices Tools used to break the copy protection on legal DVDs, making it possible to copy a film

Internet piracy Distribution of movies over the Internet

PIRATING HARD GOODS (VIDEOTAPES AND DVDS)

Internet piracy accounts for an estimated $3 billion in lost revenue yearly. But the real piracy threat is from fake VHS and DVD copies of films, which account for an estimated $30 billion of lost revenue yearly. Counterfeit movies are often sold through swap meets, by mail order, via online auction sites, and by street hustlers.

To lure unsuspecting people into buying pirated films, many video pirates repackage movies as sequels to popular movies. For example, if you were to pick up a copy of “Gladiator 2,” you might actually see a movie called Titus; “American Beauty 2” might really be Strike; and “Gone in 60 Seconds 2” might actually be a movie called RPM.

While most people expect pirated films to have shoddy video quality and amateurish packaging, some video pirates create such high-quality duplicates that only a trained eye can spot the forgery—the packaging is nearly perfect. For example, in 2002, the police raided a series of warehouses in Attleborough, Norfolk (England), and discovered 712 video recorders and 700,000 blank video cassettes that had been used to duplicate that year’s biggest blockbusters, including The Matrix, Gladiator, and Saving Private Ryan. The videos confiscated were of such high quality that many had been bought by unsuspecting legal distributors and sold throughout Europe.

Li Yixin, of China’s State Pornography and Illegality Crackdown Office, estimates that pirated videos make up 95 percent of China’s video market. Across the border, Nadezhda Nazina, Russia’s chief trade inspector and department head at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, estimates that 83 percent of all videos sold in Russia today are fakes.

While video piracy thrives in China and Russia, few people realize that Italy has the highest rate of piracy in the Western world. In Italy, pirated videos account for almost 30 percent of the total market. Not only do Italian authorities have to worry about finding and arresting video pirates, but they have another problem that their Russian and Chinese counterparts don’t have. Aurelio De Laurentiis of Italy’s national producers’ union said he had been warned against pursuing video pirates. “I got a phone call from two judges who told me I’d probably be killed by the Mafia.”

To keep up with the latest news about video piracy around the world, visit the following websites:

Report Piracy

http://www.reportpiracy.co.uk

Motion Picture Association of America

http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy

International Intellectual Property Alliance

http://www.iipa.com

RIPPING DVDS

Because CSS doesn’t stop people from copying DVDs and playing them on authorized DVD players, DeCSS wasn’t really as much of a threat to the movie studios as DVD copying software, known as rippers. DVD ripping software, like 321 Studios’ DVD X Copy program, could copy entire CSS-encrypted DVDs.

(After losing several appeals, 321 Studios eventually replaced their original program with a modified version, called DVD X Treme, which did not allow copying of CSS-encrypted DVDs. When the cost of lawsuits overwhelmed them, 321 Studios soon went out of business.)

Despite this setback for 321 Studios and the apparent victory for the movie studios, the DVD ripper market is still alive and thriving. Instead of selling their products, rival programmers simply give away their DVD ripper programs for free. DVDs can be ripped into a wide variety of other video compression formats, including the commonly used AVI and DivX formats (two popular file formats for compressing video), and the VCD and SVCD formats (two popular formats for storing video on ordinary CDs). Figure 10-3 shows one such DVD ripper program.

Figure 10-3: DVDx, like most DVD rippers, can copy a DVD to the hard drive or to another DVD.

Unlike Internet music pirates, who have settled on the MP3 file format by default, Internet video pirates have yet to settle on a single video file format. As a result, DVD rippers can often save videos in different file formats. Some people prefer watching movies in AVI format, while others prefer DivX format. For those who don’t have rewritable DVD drives, DVD rippers often include the ability to store videos in VCD or Super VCD formats so you can save and play the video on an ordinary CD.

To find a DVD ripper, visit your favorite search engine and search for DVD ripper, or visit one of the following sites instead:

AfterDawn.com http://www.afterdawn.com

BurnWorld http://burnworld.com

Digital Digest http://digital-digest.com

DVDRHelp.com http://www.videohelp.com

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