Spidey caught in Web of piracy

MUMBAI: It seems even Spiderman can’t save his movies from pirates. Poor Spidey. Within a week of Spider-Man 3’s release, the film is already available on several websites. Marvel comic’s legendary arachnid hogged the limelight yet again with a third onscreen sequel, grossing a record $382 million world over during the opening weekend.

But while Spidey was battling onscreen villains successfully, it was a losing fight on the Web. The speed has caught even the worldwide distributors of Spiderman 3, Sony Pictures (India), by surprise. The company said it was unaware of the online illegal presence of Spider-Man 3.

A few days ago, netizens were greeted by an email with the subject line ‘Watch Spiderman 3 on your PC without downloading it!!’. Many were surprised to see the online streaming of the entire movie. Again, it came as no surprise that the movie was not of DVD quality and was actually a camera print.

UFO Movies Corporate CEO Aditya Shastri said, “Unless you protect every single print, every single auditorium and every single seat you cannot stop it (camera prints). Cameras are getting smaller and memory space is getting larger. The more high-tech the crime is, the easier it is to get away with it.”

Commenting on this phenomenon, Rajjat Barjatya, managing director of Rajshri Media, admits that though numerous companies like his the world-over spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their copyright, one cannot fight technology. “The same way technology helps you, it helps piracy as well. As a content owner, I have to first make my product available legally and then stop it from being made available illegally,” he says.

Soon after learning about the piracy incident, Team ET traced the owner of one of these websites. He turned out to be Nowak Stan (name changed on request), a 22-year-old boy from Poland and studying computer informatics in a university that he refused to name. He was attending his college class when ET called him! Nowak owns the website Viraptor.info, from where he makes the links to various videos available.

Revealing his modus operandi, he said, “I don’t host it (the movie) myself. I just take whatever is already available on other video sites and make it available to people as a service by providing a link to the movie.”

This trick is working pretty well for him as he claims to get on average 40,000 clicks per day, of which 20,000 are unique visitors through this link on his site. On weekends, he says traffic goes up to 45,000 clicks a day.

Nowak says he makes a ‘little money’ out of the advertisements placed on his site through Google’s advertising tool Adsense. He claims to make about $300 a month which he says helps him host the site as well as pocket money. He also adds that he is in the process of moving out of his parents’ home. Touching but not something Spidey would approve.

Nowak is not the only guy on internet who is providing this ‘service’, as he prefers to call it. A quick browse through popular video sites reveals several websites including tv-links.co.uk and veoh.com that are providing the blockbuster either for online viewing or for download. Further, several other recent releases including 300, Mr. Bean’s Holiday and Meet the Robinsons are on offer.

Breakthroughs in internet technologies have taken video piracy beyond the shady studios of Canada and China. People can now upload any video they like to one of the many video sites where it can be viewed by the visitors to the site.

The link to these videos can then be emailed to multiple recipients. Till now the short films, with lengths of around 1 to 10 minutes, have been the most popular videos online. Today, with increased broadband speeds people can watch even a 2-hour movie online. Thus taking the audience away from the cinemas.

As per Motion Pictures Association of America, internet piracy accounted for nearly half ($7.1 billion) of the total piracy losses ($18.2 billion) incurred by worldwide motion picture industry in 2005. Given that proliferation of broadband and piracy go hand in hand, the share of internet-related piracy is expected to have gone up since then.