If you're looking forward to seeing one of the summer's blockbuster movies, you may not have to look any farther than eBay. A May 13th search of the online auction Site uncovered more than half a dozen pirated copies of "Spider-man 2002" for sale in Video CD format. The search also revealed that nineteen copies of the movie had already been successfully auctioned in the past 15 days, bringing prices as high as $35. The movie opened in theatres less than two weeks ago and won't be available on VHS or DVD for several months. Another search on eBay netted nearly 40 results for "Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones." The Star Wars sequel opened on Thursday.
Piracy is a serious problem for the movie industry, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, costing an incalculable loss of revenue from lost ticket, videotape and DVD sales.
The most common method of creating an illegal movie copy is by sneaking a camcorder into a theatre where the film is being screened or previewed and videotaping it. The video is then digitized on a computer and uploaded to the Internet, where it can be downloaded and converted into different formats such as DVDs or Video CDs. Once originating almost exclusively from Asia, feature film piracy has become a worldwide epidemic as Internet bandwidth has increased and file compression methods have evolved.
The film industry is vigorously battling the piracy of feature films, and is working with such companies as Ranger Online. The company's proprietary technology crawls the Internet looking for illegal copies on Web Sites, Newsgroups and online auction sites. According to Hemanshu Nigam, VP and Director of Worldwide Internet Enforcement for the MPAA, the association has also formed close relationships with online auction Sites such as eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon and QXL.
"eBay will not let you auction a CD of a movie as a policy," says Nigam. A list of infringing film titles is regularly submitted to auction Sites, giving them blanket permission to pull listings for those movies. Despite the vigilance, however, auctions for these titles are successfully completed on a daily basis.
"If all we had to worry about was one movie, we could take them down," said Jay Monahan, eBay's associate legal counsel for intellectual property. "But multiply that by thousands, and the task becomes very challenging."
To attempt to make the Site a safer trading environment, eBay will be introducing more security features including authenticating new sellers and will suspend a seller of pirated material on the 2nd offense. However, there's no guarantee that the seller won't re-register and begin selling under a new ID.
The MPAA said it pursues legal action against sellers even if they aren't able to stop the auction in time. Criminal Copyright Infringement can bring penalties as steep as 5 years in prison and $250,000 in fines for a first offense.
Aside from the loss of revenue that this crime causes, the MPAA advises that buyers steer clear of pirated movies for a different reason. "The quality of the movie suffers," explains Nigam. "You are probably going to get a lousy copy of a movie that you would enjoy much more, seeing in the theatres legally."
