‘Phantom Menace’ Pirated On Web
Full-length copies of “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” have been discovered in downloadable form on Internet sites as film piracy enters the cyberspace era.
Other complete motion pictures, including “The Matrix” and “Payback,” are finding their way onto the Internet within days of release or, as in the case of “The Blair Witch Project,” sometimes even before the film hits theaters.
“We’re taking a very aggressive stance and working with the FBI and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to go after anybody who has put or intends to put our film on the Web,” Lucasfilm spokeswoman Lynne Hale said, noting that the copies brought to Lucasfilm’s attention thus far have been “of very poor quality.”
While that may be true, particularly in the case of bootlegs obtained by sneaking a camera into a movie theater, some observers claim to enjoy downloaded dupes with crisp imagery and pristine digital sound.
Although inferior dupes on a computer monitor might not keep customers away from paying to see a film in a theater if it’s playing in their area, it does threaten to undermine sales in foreign territories, where people would have the opportunity to view films prior to local release.
“Star Wars” creator George Lucas has been an early proponent of electronic theatrical distribution, in part, some speculate, because the technology could make the simultaneous worldwide distribution of films simple, pre-empting, to a large extent, piracy problems.
The online service Wired News reported last week that a student in Ireland found a 1.3-gigabyte “Phantom” file at an unnamed Czechoslovakian Internet site and downloaded it onto the university computer where it could be accessed by students with a log-on.
For the average computer user, such a large file would take days to download, making it impractical. Even smaller 200-megabyte movie files that have been reported posted to the Net would be too big for the convenience of an average user.
Such bandwidth problems are expected to disappear with the rollout of cable modems and the broadband pipelines with which to use them. For instance, using today’s cable modems and a high-band ASDL hookup, it would take about 45 minutes to download a 200-megabyte file, and as the technology improves, the download times will keep getting shorter.
Reports of the illicit “Phantom” Web booty came shortly after reports that the film was being made available on pirated videodiscs in the Portuguese-run territory of Macau and with news that a theatrical print, valued at $60,000, was stolen from a movie house in Wisconsin. That print was later recovered.
Hale conceded that while it may prove impossible to identify and prosecute the individuals who posted the “Phantom” material, Lucasfilm and attorneys Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe are confident the FBI will be able to locate the Internet Service Providers hosting those sites to have the material removed.
The global nature of these infractions also makes it more difficult for copyright holders to enforce their rights. If someone posts a bootleg in Japan, and the buyer is in Germany, differing piracy laws and enforcement policies hamper prosecution. One official summed it up as “a cyberswap-meet.”
Film piracy costs the movie industry $3.5 billion in potential worldwide sales each year, the MPAA estimates.