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Topic: Fox threatens to delay dates in Canada; warners cancels promo screenings

Chad M Calpito
Master Film Handler

Posts: 435
From: San Diego, CA
Registered: Apr 2006

posted 02-26-2007 01:10 PM

I would have to agree with Anslem on this. You said it well. But, I also will agree with various points brought up in this topic.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 02-26-2007 02:04 PM

Anyone who is stupid enough to waste their time watching a movie in the horrible low quality of a camcorder video-taped bootleg is probably not going to set foot into a movie theater at all in the first place. They're idiots who deserve to be tied in a bag, soaked in sewage and then laughed at in ridicule. I'd have more respect for the miscreants if they tried searching out a good quality Chinese dub of a studio screener disc, which is how most pirate product is presented.

I kind of find it strange how the Hollywood studios continue to focus on the low-tech camcorder method of piracy at movie theaters. They might fight piracy more effectively by looking inward at their own operations in how pre-release screener DVDs and even film prints themselves leak out to high tech mass production piracy operations. But that behavior is typical in American business. It's always someone else's fault.

quote: Bruce Hansen
$20.00 for a DVD is silly. The studios could charge $3 or $4 a DVD, and still make a profit. But at $3 or $4, it would not be worth it for the pirates to make copies, and try to sell them.

Some DVD titles have pretty elaborate packaging and extensive bonus material. I think those are worth significantly more than a paltry $3-$4. It costs that much just to rent a video.

What's silly is music companies expecting to charge upwards of $20 for bare bones music CDs, even ones that are pretty old. Wait a few months after a movie has been released on DVD and that $15 to $20 price drops to $10-$15 and then $7 and then $5. You hardly ever see any price discounts like that on music, unless the CD release was just crap and didn't sell worth a damn even when new.

The problem with movies these days is there are too few worth seeing in a big movie theater or even viewing multiple times. I won't buy a DVD unless I want to watch it at least several times and have it for repeat viewings later. A DVD worth only watching once in my entertainment rack is just wasting space.

I'm not sure what can be done about camcorder pirates. Installing metal detectors might be a good idea for some theaters regardless. Too bad you can't just beat the crap out of them or tazer them and then destroy their camera equipment and slash all the tires on the vehicles. The law wouldn't allow it even though the pirates would deserve it.

quote:
Boxoffice has an article this month, touting D-Cinema's claim to have "topped the millennium mark" in terms of installs. I think they used the word at least 4 or 5 times in something like 3 articles.

Carmike passed the 1000 screen mark on D-Cinema installations this past December. Christie/AIX can at least make that "millennium" claim, but I don't know about any of the other players.

quote:
And some camcorder thieves can be quite sophisticated, as alluded to in the article. Why do you think the studios are so paranoid about DTS discs? Pirates were using them to add perfect 5.1 soundtracks to their DVD's.

Nearly all pirate DVDs with perfect 5.1 sound are those dubbed from studio screener DVDs. It's more trouble to use a DTS disc to get a 5.1 track. The CD has to be one that can still be played back via the WinAMP plug-in. Or the pirate would need access to a DTS playback unit and record the analog line outs. Then he has to re-encode the audio into either Dolby Digital or the home version of DTS (since DTS theatrical is completely incompatible with home systems). Pirated movies have a very short shelf life,

quote:
Could theatres somehow project infrared beams from behind the screen to blackout the images?

That won't shut off a standard video camera. At worst, it could fool the auto-focus sensor in the camera. But any doofus can figure out how to switch over to manual focus (and possibly would need to do so in such low light settings).

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Dustin Mitchell
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1865
From: Mondovi, WI, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 02-26-2007 03:11 PM

Tell me, is there any evidence other than 'common sense' that points to screener DVD's as the 'primary source' for piracy? I admit, it happens. A friend of mine wanted to show me 'Fahrenheit 9/11' on his computer; it had 'this is a studio screener' or some such garbage flashing across the bottum every five minutes.

I attended a seminar at Showest in 2005 that talked about piracy. One of the things they did was present a clip from a recent movie-I forget which one-which had been pirated using a camcorder. It looked surprisingly good. They should the same clip 4 different times in 4 different langauges-a feat that had been accomplished by the pirates using DTS disks. Unless they were flat out lying to us I can certainly believe it.

Look, there is a lot of bullshit coming from the studios about piracy; locked film can for pre-screenings, security gaurds to watch the print the entire time, security titles on the cans/boxes (and worst of all security titled PRINTS), those idiotic PSA's they came out with a few years back with the sound guy/etc saying 'I'm gonna lose my job due to piracy. All those things are complete bullshit. This doesn't mean piracy doesn't happen. Of course most of us have never seen someone camcorder a movie-there are 38,000 first run movie screens in the US and it only takes one to pirate at one screening to get a copy. There was an article in In Focus (NATO mag) recently about how until last year all the camcordering theft was coming from 5 states and last year it spread to 6 more or something like that.

Studio screeners that flash 'this is a screener' every five minutes are obviously not the problem. The studio my have come up with a variety of dumb ways to fight piracy but if it was as simple as cutting off studio screeners I think they would.

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Kevin Raisler
Film Handler

Posts: 52
From: Warsaw, IN, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted 03-16-2007 01:53 PM

It's NOT the Customers its the STAFF [evil]

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 03-16-2007 05:52 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
What's silly is music companies expecting to charge upwards of $20 for bare bones music CDs, even ones that are pretty old. Wait a few months after a movie has been released on DVD and that $15 to $20 price drops to $10-$15 and then $7 and then $5. You hardly ever see any price discounts like that on music, unless the CD release was just crap and didn't sell worth a damn even when new.

The above paragraph is wrong from beginning to end.

No music company is charging "upwards of $20" for bare-bones CDs. The list price of Universal (the largest company) new releases is $13.99, and the list price of new releases from all the other companies varies from $14.98 to $18.98 depending on whether the artist is new or established, and anybody who can't find huge discounts off of those prices is an idiot. Any American should be able to find any CD for at least 20% off of its suggested list price.

The idea that music never gets discounted is wrong, too. Any music store worth a damn discounts new releases, and every major label has a catalog division that discounts older titles. Music may not move to the "oldie" list as soon as movies do, its true, but good music can have a longer shelf life than even major movies do. Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON is still one of the 200 top selling albums over 20 years after it came out, so why in the hell should it be discounted simply because it's old?

The only reason that DVDs drop in price so fast is to clear out the stock, so when the sequel to the movie comes out, the movie company can issue a new, "Special Unrated Director's Cut Edition" disk of the original with three minutes of extra footage and a fancy box, and sell that for the high price.

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Bill Gabel
Film God

Posts: 3873
From: Technicolor / Postworks NY, USA
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 05-08-2007 02:53 PM

Warner Bros. announced Monday that it will no longer hold preview (market research & other early release type) screenings of their films in Canada. Because of the piracy problem that Fox brought up earlier.

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 05-08-2007 03:51 PM

The pricing pattern on new DVDs seems more like 20%-40% discounts at initial release, then it jumps to full retail, then at some point it becomes "catalog" and the price starts falling in some kind of tiered structure until it ends up in the $4.97 bargain bin at Wal-Mart.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 05-08-2007 04:16 PM

The fact remains that new DVD releases and music CDs (both new and old) are priced at pretty similar levels. The DVDs simply have a lot more effort and content going into them than music CDs.

Old music CDs don't get their prices slashed at anywhere near the proportion that takes place with DVD. If you're interested in buying a music release that came out 10 or 20 years ago you might save a couple of bucks if you're lucky. More often than not you will be paying just as much as you would for a new release.

The argument of "you have to shop around" doesn't hold up either. When "shopping around" for the best deals on both music CD and DVD, the DVD format usually comes up with the steepest discounts.

The only way I find a music CD on sale in a store for around the $4-$7 price range of close out DVDs you see at some places like Wal-Mart is by way of the used CD racks. And usually for the disc to get down in that sub $5 bracket the item is not usually in good condition.

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Ron Keillor
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 166
From: Vancouver, B.C. Canada
Registered: Jul 2003

posted 05-08-2007 07:00 PM

Warner pulls previews over film piracy

Katie Rook
National Post

Monday, May 07, 2007

TORONTO - Film piracy is so rampant in Canada that one of the world's largest movie studios Monday banned advanced previews and radio promotions country-wide.

Ocean's Thirteen and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix were the first releases affected by the move. Warner Bros.' Canadian arm cited a gap in the criminal code that prevents bootleggers from being charged.

Movies pirated in Canada made up 20% of the world's bootleg DVDs in 2005, resulting in about $118-million in losses, according to the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association.

Warner Bros. has observed a concentration of Canada-based piracy since May 2005 when videotaping a film in the U.S. became a federal offence, he said.

"The problem just shifted north," he said. "[Bootleggers] will continue to go to areas that protect them. You talk to theatre owners in Canada ... [if] they catch someone camcording and call the police, the police won't even come."

The ban will not affect press reviews or television publicity. Recent releases videotaped in Canada include In the Land of Women, and 300, he said.

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Michael Gonzalez
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 790
From: Grand Island , NE USA
Registered: Sep 2000

posted 05-09-2007 02:44 PM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_en_mo/canada_film_piracy

quote:
TORONTO - Canadian film lovers hoping to catch an early peek at "Ocean's Thirteen" and the upcoming Harry Potter sequel will be out of luck after Warner Bros. canceled all of its advance screenings and accused Canada of being at the forefront of the piracy market. Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros.' senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy operations, defended the move Tuesday, saying weak Canadian copyright rules have made the country a haven for organized crime syndicates to make and sell illegal DVDs.

It is currently not a criminal offense in Canada to make recordings of movies in theaters for personal use. In order to prosecute a pirate, there must be proof that the copy of the film is being made for commercial purposes.

"Canada does have the highest camcording rate (by individuals in theaters) of any other territory," Antonellis said Tuesday by phone from Los Angeles.

"This is eliminating one of the avenues of leaks that we have already identified."

Warner Bros. said roughly 70 per cent of its releases have been pirated in Canada over the last 18 months.
The studio's ban on advance screenings, affecting roughly a dozen Canadian cities, will begin immediately.

I have to say that I was unaware that Canadian law actually permits someone to make their own copy of a screening. That has to be exaggrated. At least I would think so.

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Chris Slycord
Film God

Posts: 2986
From: 퍼항시, 경상푹도, South Korea
Registered: Mar 2007

posted 05-09-2007 03:48 PM

Can't theaters post a policy that cameras aren't allowed and will be confiscated? And anyone who's caught with one would at least be guilty of trespassing.

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Dustin Mitchell
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1865
From: Mondovi, WI, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 05-09-2007 04:18 PM

If camcordering a movie isn't illegal the theatre would have no legal grounds to keep someone's camera. At most they could hang on to it until the show was done-which would stop that piracy attempt of course. The issue from the studios viewpoint I suppose is that there are no consequences for being caught videotaping a movie besides maybe being asked to leave.

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Dennis Benjamin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1445
From: Denton, MD
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 05-09-2007 06:15 PM

All of this is the film company's way of forcing the Canadian Government to pass the laws they want.

Simple politics.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 05-09-2007 08:12 PM

Oddly enough I think I heard in one of the meetings I attended when this topic was brought up...the law as it stands now is that the camcordering person can be asked to leave the theatre and that is about it. It is like the law recognizes it is wrong but has next to zero penalty associated with it. It is the equivalent of saying "shame on you" and that is about it.

Someone from Canada would have to speak as to why such a serious copyright infringement thing from an industry that moves a fair chunk of change around can't have a law passed rather easily. What or who is the opposition to such a thing?

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Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-09-2007 09:18 PM

Based on our juriprudence It would have ramifications on other indusrties
Even with the charter of rights (our constitution) common law preveals
Also the supreme court has upheld a very broad definition of fair use and it is very difficult to go over the head of the supreme court with legeslation it would probably stike down
As to the penalty issues all one has to look at the slap in the wrist penalties for fraud in Canada
Again Warner Brothers has a choice of doing or not doing business here they cannot dictate to the government what the laws are
And I would not be suprised that if the US film companies made enough of a international fuss then theatres would have legsalted minium canadian content laws and probably income of forgein product would be required to be reinvested into the domestic film industy as many other countries do

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