TOMB RAIDER MOVIE
ONLINE
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com Source:
bbc.co.uk
[ May 19th 2001 ]
BBC Online
reports that Paramount Pictures upcoming £100m
motion picture Tomb Raider is already online,
along with Elektra's upcoming soundtrack:
The movie
of hit computer game Tomb Raider goes on release
in June, but rumours are circulating that pre-release
versions of the film can already be found on the
net. The news shows that soon the film industry
could be facing a Napster-like erosion of its
hold over anything it produces. Already high-quality
full-length versions of many blockbusters can
be downloaded for free from the web soon after
they go on release or appear on video. The film
industry is having to fight back with legal action
and clever technology that it hopes will help
stem the rising tide of piracy. The film version
of Tomb Raider, that stars Angelina Jolie as Lara
Croft, is expected to be one of the bigger movies
of the summer. But the impact of the movie could
be dented because pre-release versions of the
film are said to be already circulating on the
net.
Net veterans
who trade movies online told BBC News Online they
had heard the film was being traded on net chat
channels, one of the many places that pirated
movies and music can be found online. "It would
not surprise me that a version of it may have
found its way on to the web," said a spokesman
for Paramount Pictures, which will be distributing
the film. He said most films tended to be pirated
when they were being prepared for release on video
and several "beta" copies of the movie were in
circulation. The film industry has always had
a problem with piracy. Poor-quality pirate copies
shot with video cameras in cinemas have been available
for years. But net technology is accelerating
the speed at which illegal copies can be distributed,
vastly increasing the potential audience for the
illegal material and helping pirates produce ever
better copies.
Anyone
who uses one of the peer-to-peer networks such
as Gnutella and iMesh will know that high-quality
versions of many movies are available to anyone
with a fast net connection or the patience to
download it via a slow modem. These systems are
hard to shut down because they have no central
server that controls the network. One of the reasons
that pirated music is so popular on the net is
because it takes relatively little time to download.
One minute of music takes up roughly one megabyte
of disk space. 'Saving grace' By contrast, films
are huge. The average digital copy of a film encoded
with the most parsimonious video coding software
is about 250 megabytes in size, and would take
over 12 hours to download using the fastest modem.
A spokesman for the UK's Federation Against Copyright
Theft (Fact) said the relative scarcity of broadband
connections to the net was the only thing stopping
piracy getting out of hand. "On the internet,
piracy is a function of the speed of downloading,"
he said. "Our saving grace is that it still takes
so long to download pirated material."
A bigger
problem at the moment is the use people are making
of the net to order pirated copies of movies.
"Our main problem is orders generating imports
from Asia of pirate CDs and good-quality counterfeits
from pressing plants," said the Fact spokesman.
But Europe, like the US, is making attempts to
stop piracy. Lavinia Carey, director of the Alliance
Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, said the EU
copyright directive was soon expected to outlaw
or place restrictions on the manufacture and sale
of technology that could be used to crack encryption
systems that protected DVDs and CDs. The US version
of this law has been the subject of fierce controversy,
with many people claiming that the record and
film industries are using the law to conceal shoddy
technology and restrict intellectual freedom.
She said the film and music industries regularly
issued cease-and-desist notices to websites and
net service providers who were harbouring or exchanging
pirated music or movies.
aEarlier
this year, the Motion Picture Association of America
sent hundreds of letters to net service companies
and universities telling them to clamp down on
the trading of copyrighted material taking place
through their networks. Ms Carey said the end
of the year would see trials of a system that
would keep an eye on what was being done on the
net with copyrighted content such as films and
music CDs.
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