While the Recording Industry Association of America’s
zealous enforcement of anti-Internet piracy laws over the last few
months has made headlines, the film industry has been engaging in a
similar, if less highly publicized, effort to prevent and deter
individuals from illegally sharing copyrighted movies on the
Internet.
At the organizational forefront of this campaign is the Motion
Picture Association of America, which employs tactics as varied as
educational outreach to elementary school students to meeting with
information and technology departments at universities, as it
recently did here at UCLA, in order to offer technological and
logistical support in order to facilitate enforcement of federal
anti-piracy laws.
Matthew Grossman, director of digital strategy for the MPAA,
describes the problem of Internet piracy of films as being much
more economically devastating than most people realize.
“The people who are really hurt by the revenue lost to
piracy are the non-celebrities,” Grossman said. “A film
like “˜The Matrix: Reloaded’ employed close to 2,000
people. But if studios continue to take losses, they’ll
simply hire fewer people.”
The MPAA routinely monitors large internet service providers,
including those run by colleges and universities, for the presence
of illegal files containing copyrighted films on file-sharing
servers. When an illegal file is detected, the MPAA contacts the
ISP, which is then required by law to take action to deter the
offending user from doing it again.
In light of the increase in demand for films available on the
Internet and the increase in availability of broadband Internet
connections, several new companies have popped up over the last
year, aiming to provide fast, inexpensive and legal access to
movies on the Internet.
One such company is Movielink, a year-old Web site available to
Windows users that allows them to download recent films that have
yet to be released on video or DVD and begin watching them within
minutes.
“Our owners created Movielink for two main reasons,”
explained Rachel Heffron, public relations manager for Movielink.
“The first being to open up a new channel of distribution for
offering films over the Internet, to really grow that business. The
other was certainly a defensive move, in order to create a
legitimate, quality alternative to piracy.”
While the popular Web site Netflix has been giving viewers a way
to order DVDs from the comfort of their own homes for a number of
years, newer companies like Movielink and Transmission Films, which
makes available hard-to-find independent and foreign films, have
developed technology that lets broadband users begin watching the
film of their choice almost instantaneously, and watch the movie
again and again over the course of their rental time. This is a
significant improvement over pay-per-view cable options, which have
fixed airing times and limited choices.
At prices as low as $2.99 per film, these new companies are
offering an inexpensive way to avoid breaking federal law.