R Nitelight
Her Rock
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2000
- Posts
- 10,003
Pirate versions of ``American Pie 2'' hit the Net
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON, (Reuters) - Two weeks before its U.S. box office release, pirated copies of the movie American Pie 2, Universal Studio's sequel to the 1999 hit comedy, are circulating on the Internet on underground file-sharing services.
American Pie 2 is scheduled to make its global debut August 10 in the United States, but Reuters has learned that digital versions of the movie are being exchanged between Internet users' computer hard drives.
Universal, a division of Vivendi Universal, was not immediately available for comment.
The movie, which has been compressed into a format called DivX, has been trafficked through a popular so-called peer-to- peer file exchange service Hotline, the main product of Toronto-based Hotline Communications Ltd.
This technology was developed to transfer large data files, but people who download it have used it to share pirated materials.
The trafficking of pirated movies has grown on the Internet, helped by a file-sharing craze that was sparked by free song-swapping site Napster (news - web sites).
With the development of more sophisticated file-trading technology such as Hotline, Grokster and Gnutella (news - web sites), and with a growing base of broadband Internet users, the ability to move large files -- in this instance, a one giga-byte size movie file -- has become much more common.
It can take less than two hours to download a feature length film using a high-speed Internet connection such as the cable modems that are increasingly used in U.S. homes, or T1 lines, which are common in most office buildings.
Grokster's technology enables individuals to search the hard drives of other computer users. For example, a recent search on Grokster for Warner Bros. release, Swordfish, produced multiple versions of the movie available for download free of charge.
Earlier this month, MediaForce, an Internet monitoring firm, released results of a probe it conducted in which it found a number of recent releases, including Pearl Harbor and Shrek, were circulating throughout Web sites and peer-to-peer services.
Now, movies are available -- typically, free of charge -- on the Net before they hit the silver screen.
``It's mostly kid's stuff,'' said David Powell, managing director of Copyright Control Services, a Guildford, England-based Net monitoring firm.
But over time, he said, ``it will eat into their business. Napster was only the tip of the iceberg.''
The Motion Picture Association of America has begun to fight cyber movie piracy on behalf of its studio clients.
It said in June that movie video piracy in the United States drains $250 million a year from the studios. There are no accurate statistics on the Net's contribution to this figure.
Universal is expecting big returns from American Pie 2. The original, a raucous comedy about a pack of sex-starved American teens, scored more than $100 million at the box office in the U.S. in 1999. The same cast, which includes Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari, is returning for the sequel.
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON, (Reuters) - Two weeks before its U.S. box office release, pirated copies of the movie American Pie 2, Universal Studio's sequel to the 1999 hit comedy, are circulating on the Internet on underground file-sharing services.
American Pie 2 is scheduled to make its global debut August 10 in the United States, but Reuters has learned that digital versions of the movie are being exchanged between Internet users' computer hard drives.
Universal, a division of Vivendi Universal, was not immediately available for comment.
The movie, which has been compressed into a format called DivX, has been trafficked through a popular so-called peer-to- peer file exchange service Hotline, the main product of Toronto-based Hotline Communications Ltd.
This technology was developed to transfer large data files, but people who download it have used it to share pirated materials.
The trafficking of pirated movies has grown on the Internet, helped by a file-sharing craze that was sparked by free song-swapping site Napster (news - web sites).
With the development of more sophisticated file-trading technology such as Hotline, Grokster and Gnutella (news - web sites), and with a growing base of broadband Internet users, the ability to move large files -- in this instance, a one giga-byte size movie file -- has become much more common.
It can take less than two hours to download a feature length film using a high-speed Internet connection such as the cable modems that are increasingly used in U.S. homes, or T1 lines, which are common in most office buildings.
Grokster's technology enables individuals to search the hard drives of other computer users. For example, a recent search on Grokster for Warner Bros. release, Swordfish, produced multiple versions of the movie available for download free of charge.
Earlier this month, MediaForce, an Internet monitoring firm, released results of a probe it conducted in which it found a number of recent releases, including Pearl Harbor and Shrek, were circulating throughout Web sites and peer-to-peer services.
Now, movies are available -- typically, free of charge -- on the Net before they hit the silver screen.
``It's mostly kid's stuff,'' said David Powell, managing director of Copyright Control Services, a Guildford, England-based Net monitoring firm.
But over time, he said, ``it will eat into their business. Napster was only the tip of the iceberg.''
The Motion Picture Association of America has begun to fight cyber movie piracy on behalf of its studio clients.
It said in June that movie video piracy in the United States drains $250 million a year from the studios. There are no accurate statistics on the Net's contribution to this figure.
Universal is expecting big returns from American Pie 2. The original, a raucous comedy about a pack of sex-starved American teens, scored more than $100 million at the box office in the U.S. in 1999. The same cast, which includes Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari, is returning for the sequel.
