LOS ANGELES — Every year around now, tens of thousands of DVDs of movies still playing in theatres are sent by Hollywood studios to Oscar, Golden Globe and other awards voters.
Every year, some of these discs are copied, and the movies end up being shared online.
This time, studios are taking a new approach to prevent this kind of piracy, and technology is playing a big part.
Ahead of Sunday’s Screen Actors Guild awards, Fox Searchlight this month became the first studio to have nearly 100,000 SAG voters view new movies such as Black Swan through a free download from Apple’s iTunes store.
Paramount Pictures, Focus Features and other studios did the same later with movies such as The Fighter and The Kids Are All Right.
In all cases, downloads expire 24 hours after being viewed and are not available to the public.
As an anti-piracy tool, virtual screenings are cheaper and simpler than past efforts. For one thing, they remove the risk of discs going missing or being stolen.
But digital screeners won’t necessarily be a saviour either. People determined to break the law will find a way to steal movies.
“Copying a stream is even easier than duplicating a DVD,” Ernesto Van Der Sar, the founder of piracy news site TorrentFreak, said in an email interview. “Moving to streaming might get the leak rate down but I can also see scenarios where it will lead to more leaks.”
Nonetheless, studios believe they must try new approaches to combat piracy.
The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that $25 billion globally is lost to it every year, and it is partly responsible for U.S. DVD sales falling from a peak in 2006 at $20.2 billion to about $14 billion in 2010.
Although the industry group says most of the damage comes from handheld video camera recordings in theatres, awards screeners are still a problem.
In the past, studios went as far as sending voters specialized players equipped with stronger copy protections than regular DVDs, but that system was abandoned as being too troublesome.
So most studios continue to send discs to voters by mail — as many as 20,000 per movie.
Oscar screeners sent out in late 2008 were the source of online bootlegs of Slumdog Millionaire, Australia, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Investigators followed the trail of unique disc identifiers called watermarks and convicted two men of felony copyright infringement.
In October, a screener of Summit Entertainment’s Red was copied and posted online a day before the movie hit theatres. Investigators traced the leak to a copy sent to the show LIVE! With Regis & Kelly.
The Walt Disney Co., which produces the Regis show, has since tightened procedures.
The penalty for uploading movies to websites can reach up to three years in prison and a fine for first-time offenders, but the penalties get stiffer for repeat offenders or those with a profit motive.
The Justice Department convicted 207 people for intellectual property theft crimes in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, down from 287 in 2007.
Cases involving awards screeners amount to “a handful every year,” according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Wesley Hsu in Los Angeles.
Kaye Cooper-Mead, an executive vice-president at Summit Entertainment, aims to instil a sense of caution among recipients of awards screeners so they don’t let the discs get pirated by others.
They need to understand “how many millions of dollars that one DVD is worth,” she said.