HOLLYWOOD -- Digital pirates, meet Hollywood, P.I.
With the recent spate of piracy arrests by the FBI, the major studios have revealed themselves to be not just the victims of copyright theft but also the prime evidence gatherers for law-enforcement authorities, handing the feds complete cases that require little more than a search warrant and an arrest.
All but one of the major piracy arrests and investigations from the past few months, including two cases of leaked Academy screeners, a piracy ring at a post-production house, and, most recently, a Fox employee who allegedly disseminated films online, have started with probes by increasingly aggressive internal investigators at the studios.
"We've been working with the FBI for a long time, but over the past year, we and other studios have been able to gather data in ways that lay the groundwork for an investigation," says David Kaplan, VP and intellectual property counsel at Warner Bros.
"Rather than just say to them, 'There's piracy out there,' we're putting together a package that's attractive for investigators and prosecutors."
Most studios are loath to give away too much detail on their anti-piracy tactics for fear of tipping off digital thieves, but clearly they're devoting a growing amount of resources to keeping tabs on piracy activity.
Kaplan notes that in addition to internal staff, Warners also works with several outside vendors in the digital hunt.
This effort would be largely futile, however, without recent advances in digital watermarking technology that allow studios to track individual film copies back to their source. Such watermarks are already being inserted into screeners sent to award voters and media and are starting to make their way into higher-quality prints that wind through the post-production world.
Technicolor is one of the studios' major vendors on this front, using technology licensed from Philips to mark individual copies of screeners and track them back to their sources when presented with pirated versions found online by studios.
It was Technicolor that traced a number of films to ousted Academy member Carmine Caridi, who was allegedly funneling every screener he received for the past several years to the recently indicted Russell Sprague, who plead not guilty to copyright infringement charges.
"We have been working on marketing and media screeners for about nine months, and this past Academy season we secured as clients several studios concerned about how often copies for voters were being leaked," says Tim Maurer, prexy of distribution services at Technicolor.
"Clearly there's now a lot of concern about security in the post-production space and we're going to offer products for that market shortly."
Despite the growth of piracy tracking, Hollywood is still focusing largely on preventative measures, hoping it can avoid a day when it has to start suing hundreds of its own customers as the RIAA has done.
It's no coincidence, after all, that despite the relatively smaller scale of film piracy, the Internet VOD service Movielink, which is backed by five studios, launched months before Apple's iTunes, the first online music store.
"The studios are putting roughly equal resources into prevention and enforcement right now," says one source close to a major studio's anti-piracy efforts. "They want to go after the biggest offenders, but still avoid offending their audience for as long as they can."
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