The Hollywood film industry, or at least its official representatives in the MPAA, likes to talk tough about efforts to combat movie piracy on the internet.  They rabidly support DRM systems to supposedly keep their content locked-down (CSS, AACS, etc.), they push hard for new laws to control how video moves around online (like ACTA and COICA) and they will happily sue sites or individuals they feel to be contributing to mass copyright infringement (too many to name).  Nonetheless, a more objective examination of how movies get onto file-sharing networks, and then how those video files get distributed, would clearly show that the movie studios’ anti-pirate endeavors are fundamentally off-target.

Widespread DRM systems, like CSS on DVDs and AACS on Blu-Ray discs, have absolutely no bearing on how or whether movies end up online, as the primary leaks invariably come from within the production process.  DVD and Blu-Ray sourced files appear online *before* the date those discs are actually made available for sale.  And not just a few days before, but usually weeks if not months before the official DVD release to the public.  Someone in the production chain of Hollywood itself actively puts the video files online for anyone to download for free, and does so *before* any DRM protection can be applied to the film.  It strains credulity to think that the film studios that contract out these services could not increase pressure on their employees and partners to prevent this kind of leak.  Yet, in the decade or so since large-scale online copyright infringement began, they have never done so effectively.

Even more telling as a demonstration of Hollywood’s lack of seriousness about piracy, however, is the annual decision by the film studios to distribute DVD “screeners” to members of the film community in the period before and during “award season” leading up the Oscar ceremony.  Despite explicit knowledge that these critically acclaimed films will immediately be uploaded for mass distribution, and even while the movies themselves are still in theaters, and months before they are scheduled to come out on DVD, the studios continue the practice.  There have been half-hearted attempts in past years to devise a more secure system for distributing these screeners, but they proved unwieldly and ineffective.

Yet the crucial point is that according to Hollywood’s own cost-benefit analysis, the supposed lost sales from the piracy of its own best films is overwhelmingly out-weighed by just the mere opportunity of these films receiving a publicity bump from winning awards.  In their own calculations, Hollywood values the increased revenue an Oscar traditionally generates far more than they fear what a leaked copy loses them.  Such a decision is at minimum an admission by the people who should know movie finances best that what is gained by the screener policy is vastly larger than any fear of possible losses.

And just to underscore the point, I looked at a few of the highest profile films from the recent Golden Globes, that had screeners leak long before their DVD release dates.  In the case of Black Swan, a good quality version of the film from an awards screener appeared on file-sharing networks barely two weeks after the initial limited opening on December 3rd.  The film has nevertheless earned over $73 million in box office revenue and is likely to receive a great deal more publicity when Oscar nominations come out.  Another high profile film, The Fighter, had a screener copy leaked three weeks after its release on December 10th, something that the producing studio, Paramount in this case, had to know would happen if they chose to make screeners available.

The MPAA and its member studios are quick to bemoan their fate in a piracy-riddled internet, seemingly robbed of “billions” of revenue (at least according to the statistics they cite).  Yet it is hard to take their arguments seriously when they routinely chose to engage practices like sending out award screeners that has proven repeatedly to foment illegitimate distribution of high-profile films.  The possibility must exist therefore that Hollywood does in fact realize that the supposed damages from piracy are actually not as substantial as they so often claim.

I predict two things to come from this trial.  

First, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde (the three main admins behind the site) will from a media relations standpoint run rhetorical rings around their opponents.  They are experts at it and the spectacle will actually be the most entertaining element of the trial, without a doubt.  

Second, and more important in the long run, nothing that happens legally at the trial will make any difference in the real world.  Guilty, not guilty, it won’t matter.  If the Pirate Bay site is taken down, if the admins are put in jail, if they receive a huge fine, etc., it will have no material impact on the availability or speed at which illegitimate content gets shared via Bittorrent or other networks.  Other sites will just pick up the slack.  Nothing will be achieved, other than to create far more publicity for the site and to engender more sympathy for the admins themselves.

According to the rules of Internet memes, I will quote from Star Wars to describe the likely result of this, “The more you tighten you grip Tarken, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  In other words, the people who create, develop and maintain file-sharing networks and P2P technology are not going to hear this news, shrug their shoulders and give up.  They will innovate around it, and come up with something that is even harder for the MPAA, the RIAA, BREIN, etc. to combat.  An easy solution would simply be to encrypt the traffic. All the major Usenet providers already offer an encrypted solution and I’m sure something could be figured out for large-scale Bittorrent and direct download sites.

Of course a better solution would be to just have the ISP’s themselves stand up for themselves and their customers and rightly point out that this idea is ridiculous.  Or to have Congress do the same.  But I’m not counting on that, and nor will the P2P community I suspect.

A couple of categories get overlooked by Andy, however, including the documentary and foreign nominees, and also whether any of the nominated films are available in HD resolutions.  The documentary and foreign films are easy to skip since they barely appear on the radar of most film-goers to begin with, and HD is not something that is too relevant to Andy’s study as all of the official screeners are standard definition DVD’s.

As someone very interested in foreign and documentary films, however, I wanted to see what I could find out about their availability for download.  The reality of file trading community is that while it tends to reflect a young, male, tech-savvy demographic, it is also vast, diverse, and maturing.  Napster was almost 10 years ago, and the first large-scale video sharing happened after 1998 with the release of DeCSS, early versions of DivX, and The Matrix DVD.  In other words, there are a large number of file traders who have been doing it for some time, and their tastes have likely developed as well.  It would not surprise me if there is a large amount children’s video available for download, as the initial generation of traders got older and started having kids.  But fundamentally, a savvy video downloader likely has a far better library of available content than any one legitimate service could possibly provide, and that includes the relatively esoteric world of foreign and documentary films, and while not every one of the Oscar nominees are currently uploaded, quite a few of them are.

Two of the documentaries and three of the foreign films have been leaked, so exactly half of these two categories combined.  Better than the rest of the nominees to be sure, but there clearly is some interest at least in these films.

On the question of HD, since none of the screeners were in high-def, the leaks of the nominated films in better resolution versions tracks when they became available commercially.  My guess is that this situation will change in the future as more Academy members become comfortable with Blu-Ray.  After all, Oscar films are precisely the kinds of movies that benefit from a better visual presentation and while seeing them in the theaters would be optimal, if home viewing is the only option, Blu-Ray is certainly preferable to standard DVD.  Of the feature nominees in all categories, 13 are available in HD (720p, h.264 codec, mkv container), including two of the documentaries, although none of the best picture films that usually come out closer to the end of the year.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds.  How quickly will the studios switch to Blu-Ray for their screeners?  My guess is not very quickly as Blu-Ray adoption in general is still pretty weak.  Will the studios try other forms of DRM?  None the previous systems worked, so that remains unlikely.  Maybe a future studio will try to allow streaming of a potential nominee to Academy members, a sort of a closed Hulu approach.  That might actually keep the content off P2P networks, but would be difficult to set up and maintain, and might not work for the notoriously non-techy Academy.