Black flag of film piracy flies for Oscars

As the final Oscars countdown begins, video piracy websites will be celebrating their own nefarious achievements: most downloaded film, earliest leak, best quality rip.

For the first time, all 26 films nominated in the major categories are available for free illegal download in DVD quality as a result of file-sharing technology.

Illegally downloading films from the internet is a year-round thorn in the side of the industry, but the Academy Awards — to be held on Sunday night in Hollywood (from 10am tomorrow New Zealand time) — always sends web pirates into a spin. Anti-piracy websites are able to compile the leak dates and sources for pirated versions of the nominated films, and compare them with the piracy efforts of previous years.

Astoundingly, it has been found that many of those in the US film industry continue to leak illegal copies to the net, despite piracy costing the industry billions in lost earnings. Web pirates mostly appear to be motivated by altruism as there is little money to be made from the practice and hefty fines exist for those who are caught.

Anti-piracy website waxy.com, run by American programmer Andy Baio, found that "all 26 (Oscar-nominated films) were available (in DVD quality) by February 7 … this is the highest percentage since I started tracking".

There is now an average of 11 days between the US release of the film and the first leak. Between 2003 and 2005 it was between one and two days.

"Surprisingly, it seems like this year's Oscar movies took longer to leak online than in previous years," wrote Mr Baio. "If I had to guess, it's because far fewer camcorder copies were released for this year's nominees … (and) I suspect it's because fewer nominees were desirable targets for cams, aside from the obvious blockbusters, like Dark Knight".

Scores of websites offer the pirated films. One, btarena.org, offers every Oscar-nominated film for 2009, organised by category.

The pirated films come from a number of sources. The earliest (and worst quality) copies are camcorder recordings made by cinema goers. Then there's "telesync" leaks — a professional camera on a tripod in the projection booth, with a direct connection to the sound source — and "telecine" leaks, where the cinema film is illegally copied to video.

It is the DVD copies that are most in demand because of their quality. The earliest copies leaked are the "screeners" — advance copies — sent to critics and film industry professionals, and then there are the retail versions.

According to waxy.com, 20 of the 26 nominated films have had a screener leak, despite digital watermarking that enables copies of a screener to be tracked to their source. That means that those inside the film industry are participating in the activity that is costing their industry billions. Efforts to prevent DVDs from being copied have failed — all encryption codes have been cracked.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the major US film studios lose more than $US8 billion a year to piracy.

Neil Gane, the director of operations at the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, said there were 47 million illegal DVDs in Australia — almost as many as legal DVDs (52 million).

He said websites such as btarena.org continued to operate by simply exploiting legal loopholes in certain countries.

He noted that "the industry's also of the view that a lot of the responsibility lies with internet service providers".

Mr Gane said the industry was having some success in combating piracy.

"If we look at the percentage of screener leaks over the past five years, it's dropped substantially," he said. "Over 90 per cent of first-release movies that leak onto the internet and are downloaded and sold on the streets allegedly originate from copies being recorded in cinemas", despite their poor quality.

However, he said that individual cinema prints were now being watermarked so copies could be tracked.

- © Fairfax NZ News