Digital Media

LOS ANGELES--Many of the major film studios have gone through a painful round of layoffs and now the industry's trade group is cutting staff, too.

The Motion Picture Association of America, much maligned by file sharers everywhere, has gone through a "significant" round of layoffs, according to a studio source. The source said the layoffs were well over 10 percent and more reductions are expected.

A spokeswoman for the MPAA confirmed the layoffs to CNET News, but declined to provide numbers or percentages. The group battles copyright infringement on behalf of the six largest film studios. How the cutbacks will affect the group's antipiracy efforts is unclear.

The ailing economy is hurting Hollywood and staff cutbacks have occurred at Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney, as well as others.

The MPAA's leadership is mostly unaffected, said the MPAA spokeswoman. Prior to the layoffs, Dean Garfield, one of the more high profile MPAA attorneys, left the trade group in December to become CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, a technology-focused trade group.

Some of the members of that tech trade group include HP, Adobe, Dell, IBM, and Cisco.

In 2006, Garfield was accused in a lawsuit filed by TorrentSpy, the now defunct BitTorrent search engine, of hiring a hacker to illegally break into the company's servers to extract confidential information. The MPAA denied the allegations and the lawsuit was later dismissed.

Elsewhere at the MPAA, the group is expected to meet RealNetworks in court again on the RealDVD case on April 1. The MPAA alleges in a lawsuit that the RealDVD software, a technology that enables users to copy films and store them on their hard drives, violates copyright law.

Warner Bros. can't protect P2P sites from getting their hands on DVD rips of The Dark Knight

(Credit: Warner Bros.)

Last summer, I wrote how Warner Bros. celebrated that it was able to prevent all but one unwatchable pirated copy of The Dark Knight from appearing on the Web.

Well, this time the pirates won.

According to Ernesto over at TorrentFreak, DVD-quality copies leaked to the Web last week at P2P sites. The DVD version of the movie, the latest in the Batman series, doesn't go on sale in the United States until December 9.

A Warner Bros. spokesman declined to comment.

This from TorrentFreak: "From the looks of it, Batman will crush Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Transformers, as it will easily become this year's most pirated movie."

Last July, Warner Bros. went on the offensive to plug any leaks. Anywhere the grainy and poorly lit copy--allegedly taken with a Handycam--appeared online, Warner sent a take-down letter.

The studio said then: "It is impossible to monitor every single screening at every theater worldwide to prevent it from being camcorded. Sadly, it is inevitable that an illegal copy of the film will eventually surface. What was a true accomplishment and unprecedented given the amount of interest and Internet buzz about The Dark Knight was despite hundreds of pre-release press, review, and promotional screenings worldwide, not a single copy of the film leaked prior to the official release."

Warner Bros. is going after the sites that posted pirated copies of the film The Dark Knight.

Studio says the first illegal version to show up online was a poorly lit, 'camcorded' copy.

(Credit: Warner Bros.)

CNET News reported Monday that copies of the hit new Batman film could be found at several Web sites. Now, a spokesman for the studio said Warner Bros. is taking action.

"We actively search for these sites and services and have them taken down," said Craig Hoffman, a spokesman for Warner Bros.' worldwide antipiracy and technical operations. "While so far we have had compliance with our requests, we certainly reserve our rights to take whatever legal action necessary to protect our intellectual property."

Warner Bros. does see one positive in the pirating of The Dark Knight, Hoffman said. No copies of the film circulated before the film's theater debut.

"It is impossible to monitor every single screening at every theater worldwide to prevent it from being camcorded," Hoffman said. "Sadly, it is inevitable that an illegal copy of the film will eventually surface. What was a true accomplishment and unprecedented given the amount of interest and Internet buzz about The Dark Knight was despite hundreds of pre-release press, review, and promotional screenings worldwide, not a single copy of the film leaked prior to the official release."

According to Hoffman, the first copy, which was a poorly lit "camcorded copy," did not surface until 48 hours after the film's release. There's no way to confirm that, but it sounds about right.

"It was that copy that propagated on the Internet during the first days of the movie's release," Hoffman said.

Hollywood can celebrate that pirated copies of this year's hit films aren't showing up on major Internet sites.

Too bad for the studios' enforcement efforts that some can still be found on smaller sites.

At the same time that the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, was drawing record audiences (the movie is estimated to have earned more than $155 million over the weekend), several copies of the film was available online.

Hit films, such as The Bourne Ultimatum, are readily available online.

(Credit: Videoembedder.com)

A half hour after returning home from watching the film on Saturday night, I got home to find my colleague, Elinor Mills, has sent me a link that apparently originated at VideoEmbedder.com. Sure enough, a grainy and dark copy of the hit film was available for viewing and for download. It was still up on Sunday but could not be accessed on Monday.

Finding newly released movies is nothing new. In the past, it was easy to find them at Google Video and other video-sharing sites. Michael Moore's documentary, Sicko, was posted to the Web even before it had debuted in theaters. Following the appearance of Sicko on the Web, some argued that movies posted to the Internet can help boost interest in a film.

Back then, Google Video was loaded with full-length films and TV shows. The site is now focused more on shorter videos even while there is no limit on duration.

What this illustrates is the coming storm bearing down on the film industry. The size of movie files used to be too large to allow them to be streamed or downloaded easily. That's changing rapidly. The time to download big movie files is speeding up and streaming technology has also improved. The simple fact is it's getting easier to share movie files.

VideoEmbedder is just an online video player that anyone can use to upload clips to the Web. Someone used the site's player to upload a full version of The Bourne Ultimatum. A link to a copy of The Bourne Supremacy led me to a post that said the video had been removed for copyright infringement.

On the front door of VideoEmbedder.com is this note: "VideoEmbedder is free to use and is not responsible for the videos streamed using our player."

Representatives from Warner Bros. Pictures, which produced Dark Knight, said they were unaware of the copy that showed up online. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America was unavailable for comment.

Representatives of VideoEmbedder could not immediately be reached.

UPDATE: 3:30 p.m PT on Monday Turns out that there are plenty of places where one can find copies of Dark Knight on the Web. Byron Ng, a computer technician from Vancouver, Canada, has sent in some links where the film can be found. I've been assured by Ng that there are others.