The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 21 January 2002.
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HERE
WATCH all the latest blockbuster movie releases for free in the comfort of your own home, even before they've hit the cinemas -- this is Hollywood's latest real-life apocalyptic vision of the future. Like the music and the computer games industries before it, the global movie business is now starting to panic about the proliferation of pirate copies of new product being shared over the Internet. Recent research claims that up to 200,000 bootleg copies of each new big budget film, such as Lord of the Rings, are being downloaded monthly. Others believe this may be a conservative estimate. Indeed, The Daily Telegraph this week easily located and downloaded full, illegitimate versions of new releases such as Lord of the Rings, Ocean's 11, Monsters Inc, Harry Potter and even Spy Game, starring Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, which is scheduled to open in Australia on Thursday. The quality of the Internet bootlegs vary from virtual DVD standard, including surround sound, through to films obviously shot in a dark cinema on a handy-cam, complete with bobbing heads in front of the screen. Until recently, Hollywood didn't appear too concerned about Internet piracy because, unlike compact MP3 music files, the considerable size of movies when converted into data made downloading unwieldy and time-consuming. On a normal phone modem, one film -- which can weigh in at over 600 megabytes (an average MP3 song file is five megabytes) -- could take as long as a whole day to download. But the growing popularity of fast Internet connections in homes across the world -- along with more user-friendly swapping software � means that download times can be cut down from a day to a couple of hours. And this has led to the parallel growth in the number of black-market websites offering films for download. To date, the local film industry has been immune from this new form of piracy, thanks mainly to the slow uptake of broadband services in Australia. By the end of last year, less than 350,000 of Australia's estimated seven million Internet users had converted to the more expensive mode of Internet connection at home. ``In Australia, broadband is going to take a little while to spread -- that's not to say it's not going to happen,'' said Ros Wilson, head of entertainment at Roadshow Home Entertainment, which handles local distribution of films such as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. ``I would think by the time that happens, there will be some preventative measures in place because the studios have to protect their copyright and their investment.'' According to Wilson, the bigger piracy problem in Australia now is the ``rampant'' black market in VCDs (video compact discs). ``We estimate that it's 30 per cent of our market, which is a lot of money.'' Sites with bootleg films are not necessarily easy to find on the Internet. Much of the transfer happens on a peer-to-peer basis, with people learning about various sites through chatrooms.
