Anti-piracy test is hit or miss with academy

Despite the hand-wringing of all the publicists associated with small, review-driven movies who need to get their films seen by as many Oscars voters as possible, 74% of the 5,000 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members did manage to plug in their spankin’ new Cinea machines.

In all, 13,000 of the DVD players manufactured by Dolby Laboratories were sent to all academy members, British Academy of Film and Television Arts members and some of the other awards-bestowing organizations, to play encrypted discs that cannot be copied and downloaded. In the past, the studios have tried to stem pirating by watermarking all the DVD screeners sent to academy members for Oscar consideration, so if one should wind up for sale online, it can be traced back to its owner. Kind of an honor system with potential repercussions.

The new machines take away the downloading option. “There was zero piracy of any titles we did,” said Laurence Roth, Cinea vice president of marketing.

The Cinea machines play high-quality images and can play regular DVDs too. But fears still run high that U.S. academy members are technophobes: Disney was the only studio that opted to use it.

Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis sounded surprised by how few studios adopted the technology, especially since only two years ago the studios tried to ban all screeners. “All the companies said that piracy was the most important issue facing them. Suddenly they’re given a way to defeat [pirates], and it doesn’t seem to be as important to them anymore.”

Cinea’s Roth pointed out that the machines had a greater penetration rate in Britain, where more than 93% of the players were hooked up. No doubt award voters there had a greater incentive: A number of studios, among them Disney, New Line and Universal, released their discs in Britain with the encryption.

Still, Tuesday’s Oscar nominations announcements could have hardly bolstered Disney’s resolve to continue using the technology. Though not a traditional Oscar powerhouse, the company garnered only three Oscar nominations for the makeup, sound mixing and visual effects in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” It is the poorest showing of all the studios.

Disney declined to discuss its experiment with Cinea, yet at least one company insider suggested that the entertainment giant was ambivalent about the experience. There was concern that the inconvenience of having to plug in another DVD player -- let alone the thought of hauling it on location or off skiing in Sun Valley -- discouraged academy voters from even taking the machines out of their boxes.

As they never bothered to plug in their Cinea players, according to the company’s registration trackers, about 1,250 academy members couldn’t watch their DVDs of such Disney titles as “Shopgirl” or “Casanova.” A significant number, considering that with the academy’s preferential voting system, it’s widely assumed that a movie can win a best picture nomination with a mere 800 votes.