Illegal DVDs of New Movies Sold on EBay

In a sign of digital piracy reaching the masses, illegal DVD copies of recently released movies are showing up in legitimate marketplaces such as online auction house EBay Inc.

Bootlegged versions of “Men in Black II,” “Reign of Fire” and “Lilo & Stitch” have been sold on the auction site in recent days. Unlike digital movie copies downloaded from the Internet, the DVDs require no special equipment or expertise to obtain or watch. All that is needed is a free EBay account and a DVD player.

“EBay creates a much larger arena for pirates to sell their goods than historically they have had,” said Mark Litvack, director of legal affairs and anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Assn. “The fact that it’s worldwide is especially troublesome.”

The MPA notifies EBay and other online auction houses when it spots illegal copies being sold. If the auctions are deemed illegitimate, EBay officials said, they are taken down and the sellers can be expelled.

But numerous auction postings slip through the cracks. At least 42 copies of “Men in Black II” and 43 of “Lilo and Stitch” have been sold on EBay.

The numbers are minuscule, but they warn of possibly much larger problems for film copyright holders in the future.

“This will only grow,” said analyst P.J. McNealy of research firm GartnerG2. “As people learn that for $20 they can get a copy of a film that is still in the theaters, a number of them will certainly do it.”

Sellers of the bootlegs have little chance of being brought before the law. Litvack said that in Asia, actions by the MPA have resulted in jail terms for some offenders, but he could not recall a similar fate befalling any offender in the United States.

Many of the EBay sellers of just-released films make a point of describing themselves as “U.S. seller.”

The packaging of the bootlegs has gotten sophisticated, judging by the pictures of the items posted on EBay. Some include lavish graphics not only on the package fronts but even stamped onto the disc.

“Some of them are looking quite realistic,” McNealy said. “The obvious aim is to convince the buyer that they are the real thing.”

Some bootleggers made modifications to increase sales. One copy of “Men in Black II” was billed as a “special edition” for younger viewers that “has been modified for small children to view it, so any PG-13 word is taken out.”

Many of the DVDs are billed as imports, and they might be, said Litvack, but not legitimate ones. He said nowhere in the world have legitimate DVDs been released for such recent films as “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch.”

That’s not always the case, however. “When ‘Crouching Tiger’ was released in this country, there were already legal DVDs of it in China,” said lawyer Jay Monahan, who heads EBay’s Verified Rights Owners program, which investigates auction items that could pose copyright problems.

Monahan said EBay does initiate some investigations of movie copies, but it normally acts only after being notified of a possible violation by the MPA or an individual studio.

“We don’t attempt to become experts on what might or might not be an infringement,” Monahan said. “But if we are notified and see that an illegal copy is being sold, we do take it down.”

Sellers found to be selling illegal copies usually get a warning for the first offense and then can be suspended for the second, Monahan said.

One of the sellers--who posted an auction for “Spiderman, Road To Perdition ETC DVDs!”--was not interested in selling anything on the site. Clicking on the auction brought up a message, “There is no item actually for sale,” and an advertisement for his online store, at which numerous bootlegs were available.

That auction was brought down by EBay after only an hour, but other versions of it popped up later.

Bootlegs, in addition to being illegal, pose other possible problems for buyers. “You are not sure what you are buying. The quality could be terrible,” Litvack said.

The discs often are not direct digital copies but instead are struck from a video made by a camera aimed at the screen during a regular showing of the movie. Sometimes heads bob up into the picture.

Some of the so-called DVDs are actually VCDs, which are highly compressed digital copies of poor quality.

That’s what an Alabama man got when he paid $29.99 for a copy of “Star Wars Episode II,” even though the seller billed it as a full DVD. The man, who asked that his name not be used, had to make several adjustments to his player to get the disc to play.

“I finally got it to work, but not in color,” he said. “But the sound was good.”

The item was well-packaged, with detailed graphics, he said.

“To me, it looked like a commercial thing. Nothing indicated it was a copy.”

He said he thought, at the time he made the bid, that the disc had been imported from somewhere in the world where it was legitimately for sale.

He was not surprised, however, to learn that it was a fraud.

“If you work at it and search hard enough on EBay, you can find just about anything you want,” he said.