Last September a complete digital copy of "Stars Wars Episode 1: The PhantomMenace," the most recent "Star Wars" movie, appeared on the Internet. Withindays, word of the copy, which was created by someone known only as the PhantomEditor, was all over the electronic ether. By October, a few seconds' search onfile-sharing networks like KaZaA and BearShare sufficed to turn up more than athousand copies of the film, all presumably available for download.
All of which is a dilemma for Hollywood. Every one of the good things thatLucas sees in digital technology may well come true, not least because Lucas ismaking them occur -- Episode 2 of "Star Wars," scheduled for release nextspring, will be the first live-actionfeature film entirely shot and edited digitally. By the time Episode 2 hits thescreens, in fact, the studios should have already launched their first foraysinto sending movies over the Internet: Movies.com (a partnership of Disney andFox) and Moviefly.com (a joint venture of Sony, MGM, Paramount, Universal andWarner Brothers). The two consortia plan to offer feature films fordownloading, as a kind of precursor to the anywhere-anytime access that digitalpundits see in the future. (Dreamworks, the studio set up by Steven Spielberg,Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, says it will do business with both.) Tobe sure, the first downloadable movies will hardly be exciting: small, blurryrectangles on computer screens. But by gradual steps, the studios say, theirefforts will lead to a Lucas-style digital utopia -- digital movies on demand,accessible twenty-four hours a day from anywhere in the world.
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Unfortunately for Hollywood, the worries about digital technology's dark sidemay come true, too. Most of the major studios belong to conglomerates that havetheir own record labels, with the exact configuration varying from media giantto media giant. Studio honchos thus have only to look down the hall to seepeople who have spent millions of dollars trying to prevent their customersfrom seizing control by distributing music on the Internet without permission.At least thus far, the labels have failed utterly. Last April, a court ordereffectively shut down Napster; within six months, according to thedigital-media firm Webnoize, fans were using new file-swapping services todownload even more files from different file-trading services -- 1.81billion music files per month on the KaZaA, MusicCity and Groksternetworks alone. Worse, from the labels' point of view, many of the new serviceswere either based offshore, making them harder to sue, or configured to takeadvantage of legal quirks which made them possibly legal.
The studios and labels -- "content owners," as they have come to be called --hope to overcome that problem by making their offerings so easy and cheap thataudiences will prefer to use them, rather than hunting for hackers' copies.There is clear merit to this argument. Even with a broadband connection to theInternet, downloading an unauthorized version of a movie from, say, KaZaA cantake many hours. (A test copy of "Star Wars 1.1" took all night to dribble in.)Clearly, many Net users will not exert the time and effort to grab moviesillicitly if they can quickly and simply download authorized copies. Alas, thepeople most likely to take the trouble to ferret out bootlegs may well be thepeople most likely to put up with the relatively unpleasant process of watchinga movie on a computer screen -- the "lean-forward experience," as it has beencalled. In the future, Hollywood hopes to have cable-like, set-top boxes thatlet viewers transfer downloaded movies directly to their TV sets. But by thetime that happens, piracy may be so ubiquitous -- and young viewers soconditioned to thinking of Internet movies as free -- that the audience mayhave no need or desire to pay. 2ff7e9595c
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