Pre-Oscar Piracy Is Escalating

One year after the Motion Picture Assn. of America began its highly publicized campaign against pre-Oscar piracy, the problem is even worse.

There are significantly more Academy Award screeners of movies available on the Internet for downloading than there were last year, according to websites that track online piracy, including all five films nominated for best picture.

And because the screeners are DVDs -- not VHS videos, as they were last season -- the quality of the copies is much better.

The FBI is investigating several cases, including the leaking of Warner Bros.’ “Million Dollar Baby” and Sony Pictures Entertainment’s “Spanglish” and “Closer.”

“We take this criminal activity very seriously,” said Louis J. Caprino Jr., acting special agent in charge of the criminal division of the Los Angeles FBI office.

Studios routinely send so-called screeners to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the guilds and other groups to publicize their Oscar hopefuls during the awards season, which begins in November.

This season, the problem of screeners winding up on the Internet “is substantially worse” than before, a person at one studio said. In part, that’s because the studios couldn’t agree on a method for combating piracy. “Some of the companies went their own way and decided to do their own thing,” acknowledged MPAA head Dan Glickman.

Some studios opted, for example, not to send out release forms asking academy members to pledge not to share their screeners. The forms, spelling out the potential consequences of disseminating screeners, were so unpopular last season that the academy didn’t require members to sign them this year.

What’s more, the studios didn’t present a unified front on watermarking, a sort of fingerprint that identifies the owner of each screener. Some chose not to place watermarks on screeners of films already out on DVD.

Although watermarks don’t prevent piracy, they do help the studios track down the source of a leak. That’s how authorities last year nabbed Carmine Caridi, an academy member who lent his screeners to an acquaintance, Russell Sprague. Sprague will be sentenced on federal copyright infringement charges this month. Caridi was expelled from the academy and ordered to pay Sony and Warner Bros. more than $600,000 in damages.

“The lion’s share of [screener recipients] are honest,” said Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide piracy operations for Warner Bros. Entertainment. “Unfortunately, it only takes a few to make files available that cause this chain reaction around the world.”

In dollars-and-cents terms, screener abuse is a relatively small part of the movie piracy problem. According to the MPAA, most counterfeit discs -- whose sales cost the industry $3.5 billion in 2004 -- come from bootlegs secretly taped in theaters with camcorders.

But studio executives are eager to protect screeners because piracy on the Internet is closely linked to illegal sales on the streets. DVD bootleggers often download master copies from the Net, where purloined screeners offer top-quality picture and sound weeks to months before a film is legitimately available for purchase.

Last year, the campaign against piracy seemed headed for a victory when Cinea Inc., a division of Dolby Laboratories Inc., announced that it had developed a new player and disc system that makes copying difficult and easier to detect.

Cinea discs are protected by electronic locks and can be seen only on a Cinea player. What’s more, as a disc plays, the player inserts a unique watermark into the movie itself. That means that if someone manages to copy a movie as it is playing and then puts that copy up on the Internet, Cinea says it can identify whose player was used.

Cinea had offered to send special players to every member of the academy and BAFTA free of charge. But production delays prevented the company from making delivery until mid-December, a month after the studios started mailing screeners.

Even before production of the Cinea players fell behind schedule, however, none of the studios had agreed to use them, according to the company. Some movie executives feared that installing the new machines would be too cumbersome for older academy members or inconvenient for those who spend the winter holidays in Hawaii or Colorado. And without the machines, there would be no point putting screeners on encrypted Cinea discs because conventional DVD players cannot decode them.

Cinea decided to deliver the machines anyway, but it was too late for them to have an effect.