Could pirates take Hollywood?
Hollywood studios are to work together to bring film on demand to broadband users, but their announcement coincides with the launch of new hardware which some fear could pose a piracy threat to the industry.
Five of the eight major studios will develop the service, initially for US customers, over the coming months. Details are scant, but the move is seen as an attempt to pre-empt Napster-like file sharing services, which could impact on the film industry as they did the music business.
‘Once people get a taste for this kind of consumer piracy, it’s very hard to stop’, warned Chris Barlas, senior consultant with rights management specialist Rightscom. Estimates suggest that up to 400,000 films are swapped on the internet daily. But due to the size of the files involved, the industry is believed to have around two years in which to develop a proprietary solution before improved bandwidth levels enable Napster-scale movie bootlegging.
‘It's a difficult one for the studios,’ added Barlas. ‘While they want to see a wider audience paying for the product time and time again, and not just once on DVD, they also have to make sure there is effective, networked digital rights management [DRM] in place.’
The need for reliable encryption is being heightened by developments in re-writeable DVD technology, which allows home users to share or distribute massive data downloads. Hewlett Packard this week unveiled the first commercially available unit based on the burgeoning DVD+RW format, which could make it easier to duplicate discs.
In June, Germany’s stringent copyright laws led a court in Stuttgart to rule that HP must pay royalties on the sale of all its CD burners. But opinion is still divided on who should take responsibility for averting piracy -– the content distributor, or the hardware manufacturer.
‘There is an onus on the distributors to make sure their content will not be pirated,’ said Peter Kumik, European managing director at security firm SealedMedia. ‘For a hardware manufacturer, there are a lot of legitimate uses for their devices.
‘The bottom line is that there’s an inevitable forward movement of technology. You can’t impose arbitrary restrictions on that because of the activities of one particular faction.’
Kumik stressed the effectiveness of existing DRM technology. ‘There will always be some way of bypassing any security mechanism, but we aim to make it as hard -- or harder -- to pirate an online version as it is to pirate a conventional version.’
But there could still be trouble ahead, according to Patrick Bossert, head of e-strategy for KPMG consulting. While films are already distributed digitally between cinemas successfully, the model becomes less secure when the consumer is involved.
‘In digital cinema,’ Bossert explained, ‘the film is decrypted as it’s played, to prevent an unencrypted copy existing anywhere in the delivery chain. But the consumer market has PCs as a target platform, so it’s open to several types of hacking devices.
‘Once films are decrypted they’re easily copied, and the widespread availability of DVD writers will make piracy for the home an attractive option. Trying to create a secure delivery technology is a real challenge, and the Hollywood companies are pretty brave to tackle it.’
Consumer demand for the studios’ new service is expected to be high in the US, where household broadband penetration has reached 14%. But Rightscom’s Barlas thought usability could be an issue.
‘Consumers won't take kindly to in-your-face protection mechanisms,’ he said. ‘They just want to be able to click and go. So if the interfaces are hard to work, or if they’re faced with multiple proprietary systems, consumers may fall back on copying DVDs.’
The studios have yet to announce a date for the launch of the new service, but details are expected to follow in the next few weeks. HP’s DVD+RW unit, called dvd100i, will retail in the UK at around £499.
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