Why Pay to See 'American Pie 2' When It's Free Online?

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Thursday August 2 7:13 AM ET

Why Pay to See 'American Pie 2' When It's Free Online?

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - ``CJ,'' a 14-year-old girl from Tel Aviv, is anxious to see ``American Pie 2,'' Universal Studios' new comedy, set for box office release on August 10. It won't hit the big screen in Israel until autumn.

But ``CJ,'' as she calls herself in an online chat forum, won't have to wait that long. She has heard she can download a copy of it now off Hotline, an online file-swapping service. ''Hotline is the best place 2 fine aniting,'' she writes in broken English chat-speak.

And ``CJ'' isn't alone. Dozens of pirates and knowledgeable, would-be movie fans are swapping ``American Pie 2'' at an alarming rate, making it one of the hottest pirated movies up for grabs on the Internet.

``Last week, I found it in two places,'' says Keir Ritchie, staring intently at a computer screen dancing with a steady stream of user requests for pirated software.

``Yesterday, I looked and found it in a dozen places. Next week it will be everywhere.

``Prevention is the key,'' a somber-looking Ritchie preaches.

As Internet tracing operative for the digital rights monitoring firm Copyright Control Services based in southern England, he scans the far reaches of the Internet -- mainly Usenet group listings and the growing crop of peer-to-peer services -- looking for offenders trafficking in copyrighted materials belonging to CCS's clients.

``Last week it would have taken me a few hours to purge it from servers. Now, it would take me days. Next week, forget it,'' Ritchie told Reuters.

This is bad news for Universal. American Pie, the 1999 comedy about sex-obsessed American teenagers, was a surprisingly big hit, drawing more than $100 million at the box office in the United States alone.

The same cast is back. And the studio is looking for an even better showing, believing teenagers (in many cases, the same crowd that's so adept at plucking material off file-swapping services) will flock to cinemas to follow the antics of the loveable loser, lead character Jim Stifler.

Universal Studios, a division of Vivendi Universal, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hotline Communications Limited, the Toronto firm that makes the eponymous software, says it is aware that ``a minority'' of its users are using the software to swap copyrighted material, but added it had no control over its usage.

``All of this material I could find somewhere else on the Internet. There are no clean hands here. It is the nature of the Internet,'' Hotline's chief financial officer John Caliendo told Reuters.

MOVIES AND UP FOR THE TAKING

And it's not just movies. Pro Tools, a digital audio program used by music professionals, which carries a minimum price tag of $8,000; beta copies of the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Windows XP (news - web sites) operating system and Apple's Mac OS X (news - web sites) 10.1 operating system, due for commercial release in September, can be found on the Net with relative ease, pre-release and usually free of charge.

One of the lessons of the Napster (news - web sites) phenomenon is that the lure of anything free can attract millions of unsophisticated Net users almost overnight to an obscure online service.

The record labels may have seriously hobbled song-swapping service Napster with a volley of law suits, but the headache has not nearly gone away.

The file-sharing revolution has gone underground.

Newer, more sophisticated peer-to-peer services pop up regularly. Flying under the radar screen, gaining attention from word-of-mouth endorsements, they have become havens for trading digital content. Like a bazaar, the more traders there are, the easier it is to find movies or software that has yet to be sold to the public.

These new peer-to-peer services are proving harder to police. Unlike Napster, the latest file-sharing services will be extremely difficult to close down.

U.S. courts forced the shutdown of Napster's central server, disconnecting users from each other, and, ultimately, from a cache of millions of music tracks.

New peer-to-peer services, such as Hotline, Grokster, Gnutella (news - web sites) and the Dutch-run KaZaA, are set up as a distributed network with no single central server. Users download free, start-up software and trade directly with other users, independently of any corporate supervision.

To shut these services down would require each user to be taken off line individually. In the case of Hotline, that would mean directly threatening three million-plus users with legal action to close their hard drives off to others, or having the ISPs (Internet service providers) clamp down on the culprits.

Last week, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, a division of News Corp., sent a warning letter to ISPs in the United States asking them to shut down sites on their network that carry bootleg versions of ``Planet of the Apes,'' the top-grossing film in the U.S. last weekend.

In a Hollywood first, the studio alerted ISPs in the letter that under the Digital Millennium Act, pirate offenders could face a maximum jail term of 10 years and a fine up to $2 million. ``Working with you and other partners, we hope to be able to identify and remove infringing files quickly,'' the studio's intellectual property department wrote in the letter.

But ISPs are not legally compelled to boot off their customers. If the ISPs decline to act, the studios are virtually powerless to stop an army of traders.

CAN MILLIONS OF USERS ALL BE WRONG?

``It raises completely new issues,'' says Stephen Townley, a London-based lawyer specializing in digital rights issues. ''It's not so much about the adequacy of the law. It's a pragmatic issue. It's about applying the law to a situation where you don't have one single case of infringement, but millions.''

Legal remedies are difficult to foresee, a fact underlined last week when U.S. Congressmen ``named and shamed'' file-sharing services believed to be responsible for disseminating pornographic material to children.

The lawmakers, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, and Steve Largent, a Republican from Oklahoma, admitted it would be difficult to prosecute them.

Because the technology -- for example, DivX, the movie compression protocol that does for films what MP3 did for music recordings -- has improved so quickly and become so pervasive it has created a community where legitimate consumers can become pirates overnight. All you need is a speedy broadband connection.

New search engines that find files and sites -- such as Tracker-tracker.com -- can spy out countless sources of downloaded materials that are ripe for plundering.

Hotline's Caliendo, for one, believes movie studios, unlike record labels, have time to address this issue before it begins to eat into their business. ``Neither Middle America nor the average college kid have access to this yet,'' he pointed out. ''But the barrier in the next couple of years is going to be broken down.''

For ``CJ'' the Hotline user, it's already been shattered.

-- (on@line.issues), August 02, 2001

Answers

CAN MILLIONS OF USERS ALL BE WRONG?

Yes.

-- (yes@they.can), August 06, 2001.


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