Young people like Jonathan Steele terrify the lords of Hollywood.When Steele wants to see a movie, he doesn't need to go to themultiplex or to his local Blockbuster. He goes to his computer.
With a few clicks of a mouse, the 21-year-old University ofMaryland senior can search the campus's internal network to findarchived files of Hollywood's best and most recent films. Want to see"The Matrix"? Click. The art film "Dogma"? Click. Or how about an oldTV show? There are dozens of episodes of "The Simpsons." Any day now,he expects to find "Gladiator" in the cache.
"Most of the time, you can get stuff that hasn't left the theatersyet," says Steele, who's majoring in government and politics. "Assoon as a new movie comes out, my friends will sit there [at thecomputer] and search for it instead of shelling out money to go seeit."
Is Steele troubled that there are laws governing this sort ofthing? Not really. "It's only technically stealing," he says."Basically, I feel if movies weren't so expensive, there'd be no needto steal them."
Downloading a movie isn't like pulling a musical recording off theInternet. Unlike most music downloads, movies taken from the Internetcan be of uncertain quality. What's more, a feature-length movie is ahuge data file that can take hours or even days to download via astandard telephone modem. But that's changing.
Broadband wires that can handle vast reams of data are nowavailable on many college campuses and in an estimated 2 millionhouseholds nationwide. With these so-called cable modems or digitalsubscriber lines (DSL), downloading a free copy of, say, "Mission:Impossible 2" can now take as little as an hour or two.
Although no one is sure how much traffic in bootleg movies existsnow on the Internet, it doesn't take a Spielbergian imagination tosee what could be ahead. As broadband marches on, some in the movieindustry worry that they will soon see the movie equivalent ofNapster--a wildly popular piece of software that has enabled millionsof computer users to search for, download and exchange recorded musicfiles.
"The advance of technology is a problem for us," says MarkLitvack, a director of the Motion Picture Association of America'sworldwide anti-piracy efforts. "As [connection speed] becomes lessand less of an issue, we are in greater and greater jeopardy."
The MPAA considers the problem serious enough to have called asummit of the major studio heads in March in an effort to developindustry-wide encryption and anti-piracy strategies.
"The music industry is getting pillaged by the Internet becauseit's so easy" to make unauthorized copies of songs, says JackValenti, the MPAA's chairman. "We've got a small window. In 18months, the technology we find so magical today is going to seemprimitive"--meaning it will be even easier than ever for millions ofpeople to locate and download films.
In a recent speech to an industry group, Edgar Bronfman Jr., whoheads Seagram Co. Ltd., the parent of Universal Pictures, said: "Inthe end, this is not . . . a fight about technology's promise or itslimitations. This is, at its core, quite simply about right andwrong."
Today Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner will addressa joint House-Senate committee on the need to "protect" movies fromunauthorized Internet copying.
Ultimately, Valenti acknowledges that all copyright holders--filmmakers, musicians, authors, software developers, publishers--arefighting not just a technological revolution but a cultural one.
To those in the business of selling original material, theInternet cliche--"Information wants to be free!"--sounds suspiciouslylike an invitation to kleptomania. "Young people have developed anethos that if something's up there, it's dispatchable to them free ofcharge," Valenti says. "I say you're stealing our work."
It doesn't look that simple, however, to the likes of JonathanSteele or Harry Hochheiser, a University of Maryland graduate studentin computer science. Neither says he has any particular love for"content" producers such as the music and movie industries, which they both view as big, anonymous and profit-hungry.
"There's a lot of resentment out there [about the price ofentertainment]," Hochheiser says. "The movie industry is insanelyprofitable. The chances that Sony Pictures profits will be hurtbecause some students download a movie is insane. Maybe someday, butwe're not even close."
Besides, says attorney Mike Godwin, author of "Cyber Rights:Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age," there's a critical legaldifference between "piracy" and simple unauthorized use of material.
The music and movie industries, Godwin says, tend to label anyunlicensed use of their products "piracy" when there's little hardevidence that any third party is actually profiting, or that theindustries are losing sales. (The MPAA's Litvack could not provideestimates of lost income from Internet movie-viewing, nor was heaware of any unauthorized selling of movies via the Internet.)
Godwin says Internet downloads of music and movies may--hestresses the word "may"--be legally protected as "fair use" undercopyright law in the same way that making a videotape of a TV showand giving it to a friend is permissible.
"The music and movie people treat this as if it's a propertyrights issue," he says. "They say, 'Even if I'm not losing money[from Internet copying], you don't get to play in my yard.' Well,copyright is not like a yard. All this is a propaganda war."
The front lines of that war seem to be on college campuses, whereadministrators have been dealing with copyright issues ever since theXerox machine made possible the widespread copying of textbooks.
George Washington University, for example, maintains a lengthy"Code of Conduct" for all users of its computer system. But thesection on copyrights does not spell out what's allowed and what'snot.
It reads, in part: "Because electronic information is volatile andeasily reproduced, respect for the work and personal expression ofothers is especially critical in computer environments. Violations ofauthorial integrity . . . including copyright violations, may begrounds for sanctions against members of the academic community."
A university official who asked not to be named notes that it'sdifficult in any case to monitor what's in the traffic. "We can't gosniffing all the [files] to find out what's copyrighted and what'snot."
George Mason University, which has a similar code, regularlymonitors its computer networks for unusual activity levels that mightindicate that copyrighted data is being distributed, says KeithSegerson, executive director of the university's computing andinformation systems. He says there have been only a "handful" ofcases in which Napster music files were being distributed from acampus server.
At the University of Maryland, the school has issued 20 to 30warnings a year for the past three years to computer copyrightviolators, all involving music distribution, says Rodney Petersen,director of policy for the office of technology. Those so warned areplaced on probation; repeat offenders can lose their Internetprivileges or be kicked out of the resident halls, although it hasn'tcome to that yet, he says.
Both the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of Americaregularly monitor news and chat forums for evidence of piracy, andboth organizations will contact a university or Internet serviceprovider when they think action is warranted.
Richard Taylor, the MPAA's spokesman, calls electronic bulletinboards "the flea markets of cyber piracy" where bootleg material isoften sold and traded. He declined to discuss the extent of theMPAA's online monitoring, but said: "We go into public forums. It'sthe same as having [investigators] walk the streets of the Bronx andBrooklyn" looking for people selling pirated videocassettes.
Bootleg copies of new movies, as well as old TV shows, can befound all over the Internet, if one knows where to look. Theoriginals usually come from people who've recorded them in a theaterwith hand-held, digital camcorders (hence the shaky technical qualityas well as the occasional image of someone standing up in front ofthe screen). But "cleaner" copies find their way onto the Internetfrom "screeners"--copies taken from a post-production studio or fromindustry insiders who've been sent preview copies.
Once the video is transferred into a computer file, it can beuploaded onto the Internet, where it's theoretically accessible toanyone with a computer and a modem.
"It's still far from the quality of a movie theater image," saysBen Shneiderman, a computer science professor at Maryland. "But thepotential is there."
One 19-year-old freshman at a New York college says he plucked "10to 12" recent theatrical releases, including "American Beauty," offthe Internet while at school this spring. Rather than diminish hisappetite for movies, he says, viewing his Internet copies stimulatedit.
"I've gone to the theater to see what I already saw off theInternet," he says. "Looking at a computer screen is just not thesame as looking at a theater screen." The same case has been madeby proponents of Napster, who say it introduces people to artists andmusic they wouldn't have heard otherwise.
Ask the freshman about the possible legal ramifications of hisdorm-room entertainment, and he simply shrugs.
A brisk traffic in multimedia content occurs via two Web sites,Scour.com and iMesh.com, which have both recently released softwarethat enables users to search, exchange and copy movie, music andphoto files. Scour says it attracts 2 million users a month; iMeshsays it has 500,000.
Both sites say their software is intended for authorized uses only(such as downloading movie trailers and music videos created byrecord companies). But there's not much stopping well-connected usersfrom swapping, say, unauthorized files of "American Beauty," copiesof which were easily located via iMesh's search engine.
Scour is a creation of five UCLA students who met in the campus'scomputer science club two years ago. One of Scour's two majorityowners is Michael Ovitz, a former president of Walt Disney Co. and alongtime talent agent. That means Ovitz represents some of theartists whose work is being passed around the Internet inunauthorized form--some of it handled by Scour's own software.
Dan Rodrigues, Scour's 24-year-old president and co-founder, takesa laissez-faire view of this. "We don't actively police thecommunity," he says. "It's too big a job, anyway. But if we getcomplaints [from copyright owners], we'll take down those links."
There have been complaints, although Rodrigues won't say from whomor how many. Meanwhile, Scour is trying to strengthen its legitimateofferings. He says the company is discussing deals with record andmovie companies, and may charge its users for access to this licensedmaterial. "As our business model evolves," he says, "[copyrightconcerns] will be less of an issue."
In the long run, Valenti worries that Internet movies will dwarfthe industry's estimated $2.5 billion annual loss from bootlegvideocassettes.
The reason is simply convenience: "With videocassettes, you haveto steal the movie, package it, copy it and create an illicitdistribution system. All that takes time," he says. "With digitalcopying, one fellow in his garage can send copies around the worldthat are as pure as the original."
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