Piracy at any stage in this process can cause the film industry to sustain heavy financial losses across the whole value chain. If consumers are able to acquire and view a film title illegally, the incentive to see and acquire that film by legitimate means is diluted; whether in the cinema, on DVD/video (rented or purchased), or pay-TV. Also, the logical extension of this argument is that the earlier the pirated copy appears in a film’s business lifecycle, the heavier the potential revenue loss is likely to be. Essentially, the earlier the act of piracy is, the greater is the number of ‘windows’ of exploitation that become vulnerable to diminished revenues.
Types of Piracy
Types of piracy in the UK involve both physical and non-physical piracy.
At the moment, physical piracy involves manufacture and distribution of either videocassette or optical disc traded in high street shops, on the internet, in street markets or car boot sales. There are both professional and consumer versions of piracy.
Large scale, professional piracy is often operated at a business-in 2003 180 million discs were manufactured and distributed.
Over the past two years, there has been a major surge of large-scale factory production of DVDs in Russia. The latest numbers indicate that there are now at least 34 DVD lines (both legal and pirate) in the country. Russia has become one of the world’s largest producers and distributors of pirate optical discs of all kinds. This production has devastated the domestic market and is now threatening markets throughout Europe and beyond. In 2002, the film industry’s local anti-piracy organisation, RAPO, seized over 226,000 pirate DVDs in raids on warehouses and outlets across Russia.
FACT total seizures of
counterfeit products (2003)
FORMAT SEIZED
VCD 120,722
VHS 86,501
DVD-R 178,577
DVD COMPILATION 2,515
DVD 1,573,510
Total DVD format seized 1,754,602
Consumer home copying on the other hand poses a far more difficult activity to assess as a potential threat to the film industry. In the mid 1990s the analogue home VCR was the only consumer device that enabled illegal copies to be made in the home. The only way to do this was by ‘back-to-back’ copying’; connecting two VCRs together via an analogue cable, one set to play, the other set to record. Less than ten years on, the home recording environment has changed dramatically. The digital revolution has resulted in a variety of new digital recording devices appearing on the market, most of which are linked either to TV or PC use.
Home copying of DVDs and other digital audiovisual content is in part possible due to the phenomenon known as the ‘analogue hole’. This refers to the fact that all connections to TV sets (as well as to other devices like VCRs) are analogue. Regardless of the fact that modern home entertainment appliances like DVD players and pay-TV decoders are digital, their output must be converted from digital to analogue in order to display them on a TV set. Moreover, because DVD players are optimised to deliver the best possible (analogue) picture and sound quality to the TV set, they can potentially provide a high-quality analogue source for copying to a blank DVD. The resulting copied DVD will have none of the digital copy protection of the original DVD and can thus be used to make an infinite number of further perfect digital copies of this single analogue copy.
No comments:
Post a Comment