Firms Push Envelope to Deter Oscar Film Piracy

Downloadable flicks wrapped in electronic locks. Special discs designed to baffle digital recorders. DVDs that self-destruct.

These are a few of the ways technology companies propose to let Oscar voters view movies at home without fueling piracy.

The DVDs and videocassettes that movie companies traditionally have sent to voters for Oscars and other awards have been fingered as a rich source for movie pirates, prompting the major Hollywood studios this week to ban mailing them out.

But several tech firms say they can protect these copies -- known as “screeners” -- which are particularly important for smaller independent producers to generate buzz for their movies.

The proposed solutions revolve around new movie formats and distribution techniques that make it more difficult to copy films -- and easier to trace leaks after they occur.

One Hollywood film publicist who specializes in art house and independent films said the various options for fortifying VHS and DVD screeners are intriguing but probably impractical for this year’s Academy Awards. “I don’t know about the timing,” the publicist said, “but in the future” new technologies might be helpful.

The studios’ main trade group is more pessimistic. The Motion Picture Assn. of America says most of the proposed fixes have the same shortcoming: They can’t stop a determined pirate from copying a movie after it’s converted from digital bits to analog sounds and pictures for display on TVs. So the MPAA, led by Jack Valenti, is pushing for new anti-piracy features in DVD players, computers and other consumer electronics devices.

Critics of that effort said it would strangle technological innovation. Nevertheless, representatives of the studios, technology companies and consumer electronics manufacturers have been privately gathering proposals, and the MPAA is expected to press Congress to set anti-piracy standards.

Circumventing Protections

Meanwhile, some security experts say the move to stop sending out screeners probably won’t make much difference in the industry’s burgeoning online piracy problem. Using high-quality digital video cameras, pirates typically copy movies as soon as they hit the theaters -- long before most screeners are sent to Oscar voters.

Conventional DVDs and videotapes have built-in protections that are good enough to stop average consumers from copying the movies they buy or rent. DVDs are scrambled, so duplicating them yields an indecipherable mess of digital bits. And DVDs and videotapes transmit signals as they’re played that prevent the typical VCR or digital recorder from making viable copies.

Nevertheless, pirates have found any number of ways to circumvent these protections. The most sophisticated can decrypt DVDs on computers and copy them digitally. Less adept pirates can use computers to intercept and record an analog signal after it has been unscrambled for display on a TV screen.

Technology companies can offer Hollywood at least three alternatives to sending screener discs through the mail.

One approach would use the Internet to distribute films with better electronic locks than DVDs use. Each Oscar voter would use a password to watch or download a movie file that could be played only once.

Curt Marvis, chief executive of online movie distributor CinemaNow Inc., said he approached the studios Wednesday about setting up an area on his Web site for Oscar voters.

He has gotten no feedback yet.

Drawbacks to Viewing Over the Internet

Granted, Marvis said, the voters would need a high-speed Internet connection, and they’d have to run a wire from their PCs to their TVs if they wanted to watch the movies the way they usually do. That may not appeal to every member of the academy, he said, but Oscar voters are more likely to be technophiles with high-speed connections than the average group of movie fans.

The effort would dovetail nicely with Microsoft Corp.’s Media Center operating system, which is designed to transform a computer into a home entertainment hub.

“They should do an ad ... with Jack Valenti watching movies with his Media Center PC, with a big cigar and his feet up on the coffee table, saying, ‘I love Hollywood and I love the way I get it with my Media Center PC,’ ” Marvis joked.

Microsoft, which provides the electronic locks for Marina del Rey-based CinemaNow’s movies, concedes that any type of protection can be circumvented. That’s why it designed its security system to change when a file is cracked open by pirates, limiting the potential damage.

Even so, Brad Hunt, chief technology officer for the MPAA, said today’s PC had too many security holes to be trusted by Hollywood. Beyond that, he said, an Internet-based approach wouldn’t work for many Oscar voters because they didn’t have computers hooked up to their home theaters.

An Oscar campaign consultant said few filmmakers would approve of having their movies downloaded off the Internet because they wouldn’t want Academy voters watching their big-screen opuses on computer screens with tinny speakers.

A second possibility is to put screeners on a new type of disc from Flexplay Technologies Inc. that becomes unplayable one to two days after the package is opened. The so-called EZ-D discs are made with a resin that gradually changes as it is exposed to air, effectively turning the DVDs into beverage coasters.

This short viewing period wouldn’t make the disc harder to copy, but it would address the main reason Oscar screeners fuel piracy: Voters frequently pass the movies on to family members and friends, and eventually they fall into the hands of pirates.

“Flexplay’s viewing window can be as short as eight hours, limiting the chance for discs to be passed along,” Flexplay Chief Executive Alan Blaustein said. He added that Flexplay has spoken to MPAA members about using EZ-D discs to curb pass-alongs, but no deals have been announced.

Instead, Buena Vista Home Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Walt Disney Co., plans to test the public’s response to EZ-Ds by selling discs with 48-hour viewing periods in four cities this fall.

The Oscar consultant, though, pointed out that DVDs that change as they are exposed to air don’t work in every player.

Other Solutions Are in the Works

Several companies are working on other ways to alter DVDs to foil pirates.

One technique being explored by Macrovision Corp. of Santa Clara is to prevent a computer from extracting the data from a DVD without stopping the disc from playing the movie. The tactic is similar to the one Macrovision and others are using to prevent a new breed of music CDs from being copied easily.

Adam Sexton, a marketing executive at Macrovision, declined to reveal the technique used by the altered DVDs, saying only that it was related to encryption, digital watermarks and other proprietary technologies. The discs should be ready next year, he said.

In addition, Technicolor, Digimarc Corp. and several other companies are developing another tool that could help deter DVD piracy: forensically trackable discs.

A trackable disc would include a unique digital watermark, which is a security code designed to be passed on to copies. That way, investigators who obtained a pirated disc could find the security code and identify the source of the leak.

Such codes already are used in the films sent to theaters, and some anti-piracy experts are skeptical of their effect.

But the threat of being identified and penalized for aiding piracy may prompt Oscar voters to keep screeners under tighter wraps.

The ‘Analog Hole’ Remains a Loophole

The shortcoming for the DVD-based approaches, Hunt of the MPAA said, is that they don’t close off the “analog hole” -- the unscrambled audio and video signals that flow from a DVD player to a TV set.

Although most VCRs and digital recorders are designed not to record those signals, some computers’ video recorders are not, Hunt said.

“We’re talking to a lot of companies about secure screener technologies,” he said. But given the analog-hole issue and the demands of influential Oscar voters for discs that work easily in their home theaters, he said, “it’s really kind of a challenging problem.”

*

Times staff writer Susan King contributed to this report.