Latest Plot Twist for ‘Star Wars’: Attack of the Cloners

A week before the movie’s release, unauthorized copies of the next “Star Wars” episode hit the Internet on Thursday, offering a stark demonstration of Hollywood’s growing problem with piracy in a digital age.

The early release of “Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones” is the latest example of how high-quality bootlegs of blockbuster movies appear online long before they are available in video stores--in some cases even before they hit the theaters. “Spider-Man,” for instance, appeared on the Internet a day before its official premiere.

Improved picture quality, combined with the proliferation of high-speed Internet links and easy-to-use piracy tools, means that illegally copied movies are rapidly reaching the mass market, not just a cadre of Net-addicted geeks. Studio executives fear that bootlegged movies will be as popular and as easy to get as pirated music is today.

And with the popularity of the “Star Wars” franchise, the pirated versions of “Attack of the Clones” could attract an unprecedented pre-release audience. “A million people will have seen ‘Star Wars’ before it’s opened,” predicted Bruce Forest, an independent media technology consultant and an expert on piracy. “That’s never happened before.”

Many industry observers do not expect the bootlegs of “Attack of the Clones” to cut into box-office receipts, but some worry about the effect on videotape and DVD revenue, which makes up a significant portion of a studio’s profit.

“The experience in theaters is a thousand times more dynamic than you would ever get on a computer screen at home, so what people will be getting is just some sense of the plot line of the film, without the full impact of the special effects,” said Richard Jewell, associate dean of the School of Cinema-Television at USC.

“Where it’s a complete disaster is in the home video business,” said Nancy Newhouse Porter, a Los Angeles entertainment attorney. “Now they can make copies and ship digital files to places like China, where we have a really hard time enforcing our copyright laws.”

The pirating of “Attack of the Clones” lends fuel to the film industry’s efforts in Washington to crack down on piracy. While the studios’ trade association steps up its enforcement activities, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would require computers and consumer electronics to be modified to deter unauthorized copying.

“It’s an extremely serious threat,” said Jean Murrell Adams, head of the litigation department at DreamWorks SKG. “I’m not surprised that it’s on the Internet. I talk to pirates because I want to find out why they’re doing this. And what I’ve been told is that they were eagerly anticipating who would be first to do this. It’s a challenge for them.”

One bootleg version of “Attack of the Clones” appears to have been made at a private showing of the film, using a tripod-mounted digital camcorder pointed at the screen. Another evidently employed a more sophisticated version of the same technique.

Both were distributed first through Internet Relay Chat, an arcane computer protocol that enables users to copy files at high speed from other computers on far-flung networks.

The previous “Star Wars” installment also was available online before its official release in May 1999. But the number of people downloading movies and music was comparatively small then because high-speed Internet connections were uncommon and the tools for sharing files, such as IRC, were difficult for casual users to master.

Today, tens of millions of people are on file-sharing networks that make searching for and copying media as easy as finding a Web site. And it takes only a few hours for a movie to leap from the confines of IRC to the wide-open world of the file-sharing networks, such as Morpheus and Kazaa.

Studios have been taking great pains to protect their movies from pirates. Columbia Pictures, for example, put markers on each print of “Spider-Man” to track bootleg copies of the movie and placed extra security guards in theaters to prevent illegal recordings during screenings.

Still, a bootleg of the movie appeared on a single IRC channel the day before the premiere and then migrated rapidly to hundreds, if not thousands, of computers on file-sharing networks.

“The fact that people have taken a digital camera into a screening isn’t novel in itself,” said analyst P.J. McNealy of GartnerG2, a technology research and consulting firm. “There’s just more hype around this one because it’s ‘Attack of the Clones.’ There’ll be a huge traffic spike.... Absolutely, because it’s a high-profile movie.”

The nature of the “Star Wars” features, though, could make ticket sales unusually resistant to the effects of piracy, some observers say.

“I don’t think this will have any significant financial impact on the box-office revenues,” McNealy said. “It is a big-screen movie. The people who are going to download it will think it’s neat and talk about it around the water cooler [but still buy tickets]. It just adds to the hype of the movie because it’s that much in demand.”

Neither Lucasfilm Ltd., the movie’s producer, nor 20th Century Fox Film Corp., its distributor, commented Thursday.

Piracy is a front-burner issue for the top Hollywood studios, which already have been stung by high-profile piracy abuses. Bootleg copies of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” appeared in China within days of the movie’s release last year. Rampant piracy of Hollywood movies continues in China, where the government pledged to strengthen and enforce its copyright law.

The studios’ international trade group, the Motion Picture Assn., is fighting piracy by trying to knock the sources of bootlegged movies off the Net.

Hemanshu Nigam, vice president and director of worldwide Internet enforcement for the MPA, said his group uses technology that searches many online sources continuously for about 1,400 Hollywood titles. If a pirated movie is found, the MPA quickly contacts the source’s Internet service provider and recommends “appropriate action” or, in the case of repeat offenders, requests a more aggressive effort.

The MPA sent 54,000 letters last year and more than 18,000 in the first quarter of 2002, Nigam said. And the letters seem to be having an effect, he said, adding that the number of bootlegs has dropped dramatically on Internet newsgroups and on some file-sharing services.

Nigam said that as a rule of thumb, a movie that premieres on a Friday will appear on the Internet by Saturday afternoon.

“The pirate community is getting better trained in how to get those movies online,” he said, adding: “There’s more people that are capable of putting it up.”

High-profile roundups by law enforcement agencies are the most effective deterrent, Nigam said. After the arrests in December of individuals charged with bootlegging software, games, music and movies, he said, the MPA saw a 45% drop in piracy online--although “it only lasted a few weeks.”