Havocscope Black Market News » counterfeit and piracy

Pirated copies of Blu-Ray DVDs are creating huge profits for sellers.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Movie pirates are going after Blu-ray, using a technological twist that makes their illicit copies both cheap to make and tough for consumers to spot.

Pirates are taking advantage of the fact that many viewers can’t tell the difference between Hollywood’s new high-definition, higher-priced Blu-ray movie format and a bootleg format — called AVCHD — that’s a grade lower: AVCHD uses 720 horizontal lines of resolution instead of Blu-ray’s 1,080, but still offers a sharper picture than an ordinary DVD on high-definition television sets.

The movies are pulled off Blu-ray discs using easily available software. Because of the lower resolution, they can be put on ordinary blank DVDs instead of more costly blank Blu-ray discs. That makes them quite profitable for pirates to make, warns the Motion Picture Association, the industry group that battles piracy on behalf of the studios owned by Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc., Sony Corp., News Corp., Time Warner Inc., and General Electric Co.

A Calgary man is believed to be the first conviction under an anti-piracy law in Canada.

From CBC News:

A Calgary man is believed to be the first person convicted in Canada under new movie pirating legislation when he pleaded guilty to the unauthorized recording of the Johnny Depp movie Sweeney Todd.

Richard Lissaman was arrested in a northeast Calgary theatre last Dec. 21 making an illegal copy of the movie.

The 21-year-old pleaded guilty on Friday, was fined $1,495 and banned from movie cinemas for a year.

Other stipulations for his one-year probation include being banned from purchasing, owning or possessing any video recording equipment, including one on a cellphone.

“We would have liked to see jail … however, this is a good start,” said Virginia Jones of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association.

Warner Brothers will begin selling its movie as downloads in China in an attempt to stem piracy.

From the LA Times:

The studio struck a deal with Union Voole Technology in China to offer new movies, as well as those that have never been seen in Chinese theaters, at rental prices ranging from 60 cents to $1. The inexpensive video-on-demand service seeks to entice China’s estimated 253 million Internet users to pay for Hollywood fare rather than download illicit copies.

“Every major American company has tried to figure out and crack the nut in China,” said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group. “We believe that we have an opportunity, through digital distribution,” to solve that problem.

The rapid growth of Internet access in China presents a way for the studios to establish a legitimate business in China, where an industry study estimated $2.7 billion in lost potential sales due to pirated DVDs in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. About 93% of the movies sold in China are counterfeit — black-market discs sold in stores and by legions of roaming vendors who peddle them at subway stations and from their bicycles.

France’s Senate has passed a three strikes law would cut off Internet access for people who continue to download unlicensed music.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

France is on a collision course with the EU after the French Senate overwhelmingly voted for an Internet piracy law that directly contradicts European Parliament legislation.

The Senate’s “three strikes” or “graduated response” law would cut off access to the Internet to Web surfers who repeatedly download copyrighted films, music or video games without paying.

But the French legislation clashes with an amendment agreed to by Euro-MPs in September that outlaws Internet cutoff.

Counterfeit drugs are being smuggled into the United Kingdom, jeopardizing the lives of millions of patients.

From the Independent:

Packets of fake pills are being smuggled into high-street chemists and sold as real medicines that prevent heart attacks or fight cancer, putting the lives of millions of British patients at risk.

Criminal gangs that cut their teeth selling fake Viagra on the internet and went on to push dummy drugs in poor countries are now suspected of infiltrating the supply of medicines in the developed world.

“Counterfeit drugs could be compared to arms trafficking. It really is the same kind of dangerous crime,” said Françoise Grossetête, a French MEP and member of the parliament’s public health committee, at an international conference on the problem in Brussels. “It could become a form of terrorism.”

Myspace and MTV is attempting to allow owners of pirated content to profit from their works being display on their websites.

From Hollywood Reporter (via Reuters):

A new technology that essentially allows content owners to profit from piracy will get a high-profile test this month from MySpace and MTV Networks.

Instead of triggering the usual take-down notices, copyright-infringing footage of select MTV Networks programing uploaded by MySpace subscribers would be automatically redistributed with advertisements that would generate revenue for the companies. MTV Networks is the parent company of such channels as MTV, BET, Comedy Central, Spike and Nickelodeon.

MySpace is turning to third-party tech firm Auditude to deliver the technology through a combination of patented assets: a sophisticated ad-serving platform with a video-fingerprinting system that cross indexes billions of seconds of TV and online footage in seconds.

As the Philadelphia Phillies attempt to close out the World Series tonight after rain suspended their game against the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday, Major League Baseball has been keeping busy seizing counterfeit apparel from street vendors.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Since the playoffs began, MLB investigators have seized more than 5,000 counterfeit T-shirts and caps from about 45 vendors hawking them in the vicinity of Citizens Bank Park, said Ethan Orlinsky, general counsel for Major League Baseball Properties.

The fakes are often hard to distinguish from their properly licensed counterparts, although they may be made with substandard materials that won’t wear or wash as well, said Orlinsky, whose office oversees licensing deals for the National and American Leagues and all 30 teams.

To help fans tell the difference, MLB requires that each legitimate item, large or small, be tagged with a silver holographic sticker bearing a serial number and MLB’s silhouetted-batter logo. For this year’s World Series, MLB refined the sticker to include a raised red stitch that mimics the stitching on a baseball.

Merchandise sales are big business for baseball - making it to the World Series is expected to generate at least $4 million in extra sales of Phillies memorabilia. Orlinsky said it was no surprise that the Fall Classic is a magnet for counterfeiters.

Computer users in China are upset at Microsoft for recent measures taken to curb piracy in the country.

From the New York Times:

The furor stemmed from an update to Windows XP Professional that Microsoft began offering users in China last week. The new version of WGA’s Notifications, the software that provides the messages and other on-screen prompts when another component detects an illegal copy, displays a black desktop on counterfeit versions of the operating system and a permanent nag notice in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Users can change the background, but it reverts to black after an hour.

The new black-screen nag took effect Monday in China.

Microsoft announced the change to Notifications in August, explaining then that it was bringing Windows XP Professional’s anti-piracy software in line with that of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Previously, WGA’s nagging in Windows XP was limited to a message at log-on and periodic secondary notices that popped up in a small balloon; the desktop was not altered, and the software didn’t put a persistent message on the screen. Windows XP Professional users in other countries, including the U.S., have already seen the update.

Chinese users railed at the change. “First of all, Microsoft antipiracy [has the] wrong focus,” said Liu Peng in a post to the Sina.com portal, according to a machine translation of the entry. “The fight against piracy should focus on the pirates.”

Major League Baseball is ramping up its anti-counterfeit program to ensure that World Series Memorabilia is kept safe from counterfeits.

From the Boston Globe:

Once the first inning of every playoff game ends, Major League Baseball’s authentication program goes into effect. During Game 5 of the American League Championship Series at Fenway Park, groundskeepers rushed onto the field and replaced the bases. MLB authenticator and 37-year Boston police veteran Jim Carr waited for the bases in Canvas Alley, the field-level walkway with direct access to the diamond.

Carr laid the bases in a row and tagged each one with a specially designed hologram. He repeated the process after the second inning, then carted the two sets of authenticated bases to a closet deep beneath the ballpark.

The closet contains a treasure trove of memorabilia, everything from bases to balls to lineup cards to broken bats to the Korbel champagne bottles popped when the Red Sox clinched the American League Division Series. Every piece of memorabilia is registered as authentic in an MLB database by the coded hologram that disintegrates when removed, preventing the transfer from one piece to another.

When the World Series starts tonight, the treasure trove of more than 2 million pieces of authenticated memorabilia will grow again as baseball works overtime to safeguard its history and protect its fans from counterfeiters.

“Baseball sells its history,” said Bob DuPuy, MLB’s president and chief operating officer. “We want to ensure what our fans get is, in fact, authentic and genuine.”

Private Universities are spending close to $500,000 in anti-piracy efforts to prevent students from utilizing file-sharing networks.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Colleges are spending a good deal of money to prevent students from downloading copyrighted music and movies, says a report released today. And with new requirements recently imposed on institutions of higher education by Congress, the report’s author argues, the cost of fighting piracy could rise even further.

The report, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance,” describes a study conducted by the Campus Computing Project, which surveys colleges about their use of information technology.

The breakdown of spending by the colleges:

Deterrents to piracy, on the other hand, can be costly. Private universities spent an average of $408,000 during the 2007 academic year on antipiracy efforts—about $105,000 on bandwidth-management and traffic-monitoring software, $159,000 on hardware, and $144,000 in additional costs, the study found. Public universities spent nearly $170,000 apiece, including $22,000 on software, $65,000 on hardware, and $83,000 in other expenditures.

Community colleges, which typically do not give students access to residential computer networks, ran up significantly lower costs fighting piracy: They spent an average of about $7,000 on software and $43,000 on hardware, says the report.

In addition to the hardware and software costs, Mr. Green says, institutions use considerable staff time “doing pro bono enforcement for the entertainment industry.”