p2pnet.net News:- One of the Big Movie Events of last year and early 2004 was the Great Movie Screeners Farce starring MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti.

And coming soon, apparently, is Scrambled Screeners.

For the past couple of years, the movie industry has reported all-time record earnings - profits in their billions - simultaneously claiming awful human suffering and tremendous financial hardship because of online piracy.

While Valenti frothed and fumed at the vile file sharers who, he ranted, were posting copies of the latest releases on the p2p networks, a report from AT&T Lab’s Secure Systems Research program said of 285 underground movies sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.

There was a massive outcry when ‘Samurai’ and ‘Mystic,’ ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ ‘thirteen’ and ‘Calendar Girls’ turned up online. File sharers again, swore Hollywood.

Then, “Technicolor technicians determined that copies of such pirated movies as Warners’ ‘Samurai’ and ‘Mystic,’ 20th Century Fox’s ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,’ Fox Searchlight’s ‘thirteen’ and Buena Vista’s ‘Calendar Girls’ were traced to Academy screeners” in the possession of Yep, a Hollywood insider, one Carmine Caridi, a 22-year member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was the most-posted movie on the p2p networks in April. Gibson sued not file sharers, but a Hollywood post-production company.

Valenti didn’t abandon his cause, however, continuing to turn many interesting shades of pale as he tried to stop the distribution of screeners to the media and the Hollywood elite.

But his efforts were for nought. Screeners are still around, and kids are still using camcorders made and marketed by the likes of Sony - one of the MPAA’s owners - to film films, many (most?) of which show up online, usually as deeply flawed, jerky-framed, shrunk-to-the-extreme files with terrible colouring and lighting.

They’re posted more for competitive purposes than as a way to swindle the obscenely rich studios out of their rightful dues.

The Feinstein / Cornyn Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act takes care of all those pesky teenagers and their camcorders while the professional counterfeiters and duplicators who flood world markets with fake ‘product,’ run rings around the entertainment industry and its pseudo-cops.

Hollywood tries to make out they’re one and the same. But of course, they’re not.

Meanwhile, Scrambled Screeners are on the horizon, says Martin Grove in a Hollywood Reporter story here.

And this time around, “the MPAA can’t dictate policies and because of collusion concerns the studios can’t adopt an industry-wide approach,” says the story, going on:

“One proposal that’s been making headlines would give members of the Academy, British Academy and Hollywood Foreign Press Association free DVD units that can play encrypted discs. Whether awards voters would be able to install and use this equipment and whether the video pirates lurking in the shadows would figure out how to duplicate these scrambled screeners are among the many questions that need to be answered.”

Actually, one of the questions has been answered over and over again. Scrambled means ‘protected’ by some kind of DRM application and so far, not one DRM-ed disc has remained uncracked for more than a couple of minutes. Literally.

“Last year’s MPAA plan disenfranchised most critics and media people,” says the Hollywood Reporter. “They weren’t given an opportunity the way Academy members were to receive screeners if they signed contracts promising they wouldn’t allow the films out of their hands. In the proposal Hollywood’s focusing on right now in which specially designed DVD players would be given out free to those voting for Oscars, Globes and BAFTAs, the media would once again get the cold shoulder.”

That seems more than a little unjust since the mainstream print and electronic media act as entertainment industry PR flacks and marketers, faithfully disseminating Hollywood’s utterances as if they come from credible sources.

Anyway, there are problems - and not just because the scribes will apparently be missed out.

“The plan to hand out free DVD players that can play encrypted discs runs into problems beyond the fact that the high cost of the machines -said to be around $500 per player - means that many people who should see screeners will be excluded from doing so because they won’t have access to the hardware, says Grove, pointing out that not everyone who receives one will be able to figure out how to use it.

“Already jokes are being made about how only those elderly Academy members with grandchildren living nearby will be able to get their DVD machines up and running,” he says, wondering how successful the encryption system would be when it comes to stopping piracy.

“I wouldn’t have a clue about how to begin to make copies of an encrypted DVD, but I’m not so sure the pirates are going to be stopped in their tracks for very long,” he says, acknowledging, how successful hackers have been at defeating expensive security systems intended to protect computers around the world.

“Frankly,” Groves concludes, “I’m impressed enough with how well these pirates and hackers operate in cyberspace that I’m skeptical about how long any encryption system Hollywood embraces will keep them at bay. I may be wrong about this and maybe it will work really well.

“Still, I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s thinking what a disaster it would be to adopt an approach that limits the viability of screeners as an awards marketing tool in the name of stopping piracy only to find that the pirates have another hook up their sleeve.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2004 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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