‘COTTON CLUB’ CASSETTES ENCODED AGAINST PIRACY

“The Cotton Club,” which hits the video stores today, will be the first videocassette to carry a new anti-piracy process that its developers say should eliminate casual, illegal duplicating by consumers.

The process, created by Macrovision, will produce home-copied cassettes that are “perfectly unwatchable,” an official says. The process, announced at a Tuesday press conference by Embassy Home Entertainment, which is distributing “The Cotton Club” videocassette, is the invention of John Ryan.

He explained that all videocassettes of the film (which sell for $79.95) are encoded with a process that interferes with a videocasette recorder’s “automatic gain control,” creating a weak, dim and noisy copy.

Since the cassette carries no mention of the new process, amateur bootleggers who try to copy the cassette using two VCRs might assume that the VCR machines are responsible for the poor copies.

“At some point, copyright law has to come before consumer law,” said an Embassy spokeswoman.

According to Macrovision chairman Victor Farrow, the process costs between 15 cents and $1 per cassette, depending on the length of the film and the number of cassettes encoded. The technique can also be used, Ryan said, by commercial and cable-TV operators and is effective on laser discs.

Ryan demonstrated the process and pointed out that it does not affect the quality of the original cassette, a complaint that a previous anti-piracy system, Copyguard, has drawn. Ryan acknowledged that the process probably would have little effect on professional piracy operations.

Andre Blay, chairman and chief executive of Embassy Home Entertainment, said that all forms of piracy cost the video industry “10% to 20% of the market in the United States, 50% and more elsewhere.”