DVD-sniffing hounds, night-vision scopes-these techniques seem plucked from the movies themselves.
Pirates be warned: Hollywood has hunkered down to battle the illegal underbelly that costs the film industry over $18 billion a year.
The newest additions to the anti-piracy team go by the names Lucky and Flo, a pair of black Labradors trained to sniff out, among other hardware smells, the polycarbonates in DVDs.
Lucky and Flo attracted recent attention for a bust in Queens County, New York. Their raid, in coalition with Queens' Retail Security led to three arrests and the confiscation of 12,000 pirated discs.
In a previous six-month operation in the Philippines and Malaysia-code named "Double Trouble"-the dogs engaged in 35 raids, leading to the arrest of 26 individuals, the seizure of nearly 2 million discs-totaling $3.5 million-and the location of 97 DVD-burning towers, said John Malcolm, executive vice president and director of worldwide piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America.
"They are important ambassadors to the movie industry, protecting creativity, and pointing out how bad the piracy problem is." Malcolm said.
Lucky was scheduled to be euthanized when expert dog trainer Neil Powell identified her as a good candidate for a canine anti-piracy unit.
From pirate syndicates' cargo shipments to mislabeled stock discovered in warehouse DVD-burning operations, the hairy duo has severely harried proponents of the bootlegging industry.
"We had a number of investigators threatened, stabbed, even shot, so we know organized crime syndicates are very dangerous," Malcolm said. "It took a Malaysian bounty on the heads of the dogs to bring that message to the public."
Lucky and Flo were so successful in their busts that Malaysian pirates have put 100,000 Malaysian ringgits-a hefty 30,000 in U.S. dollars-as bounty on the dogs. The fact that this number far exceeds the per capita income of the average Malaysian citizen reveals the threat this new initiative poses to such a lucrative illegal industry, Malcolm said.
But the piracy community isn't confined to overseas' networks. About 90 percent of pirated content begins as a camcorder copy made in your local theater.
It's been a mere two years since the United States passed the Family Entertainment Copyright Act, which made recording in theaters a felony. Gone is the day when recording in a theatre led to a polite request to leave the premises.
A technique currently employed to curb in-theater piracy is the use of night-vision scopes and goggles during screenings, opening week releases and implicated hotspot theatrical locations for piracy.
Recent confusion from a D.C. audience member who believed he was being videotaped at an Invasion screening provoked discussion of privacy infringement among ruffled bloggers from popular tech sites The Consumerist and Digg.com.
Melanie Bell, spokesperson for AMC Entertainment, Inc., said that the incident was the result of a studio hiring a private security company to look for film theft during the opening weekend of one of their films.
"Yes, it is public knowledge that our partners at some studios use night-vision equipment-not AMC," Bell said.
What audiences see is a security or screening administrator-not associated with typical theatre personnel-scanning the crowd from the ground level with a camera-like device.
But both Bell and a Warner Bros. representative, who preferred to remain anonymous, assured that the night-vision equipment is not used to record audiences, but to allow for immediate recognition of the red LED light of a camcorder.
"We've been using it for the past couple of years because it's really since the explosion of the internet that digital camcorders have created such a problem," the representative said. "[The technique] is not specific to Warner Brothers and is used fairly widely."
Because a single pirated recording can be used as a template for millions of worldwide copies, the MPAA's multi-pronged anti-piracy approach devotes a great deal of attention to in-theater piracy. Working with both studios and exhibition facilities, the MPAA focuses its attention on everything from federal legislation and law enforcement to intelligence resources and audience incentive programs.
"There are a lot of very smart people at MPAA and private companies that work on very exciting initiatives... to curb online piracy, groups such as movie labs [devoted entirely to] anti-camcording technology," Malcolm said.
Innovative technology and unexpected tactics, once enemies to film studios and distributors, have found a new home in the defense effort against bootlegging.
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