Hollywood Studios Finance Anti-Piracy Project
A new nonprofit R&D organization charged with creating new technologies to prevent online film theft and unauthorized distribution has been created by 6 major movie studios. Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner are backing the Motion Picture Laboratories, also known as Movielabs. The project will get more than $30 million financing for its first 2 years, according to Hollywood executives involved.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The studios’ pooled investment boosts chances to develop ways to fight motion picture theft that otherwise might remain dormant, the studios said Mon. Projects on Movielabs’ agenda include creating devices to spot camcorders in theaters and evaluating technologies for traffic shaping, port access controls and client software detection, plus data management and related tools. To fight piracy, inventions resulting from Movielabs’ work will be recommended for licensing to universities, corporations, ISPs and other network services operators.
Movielabs is “a smart investment that will help the entertainment industry adopt new means of fighting piracy and protecting copyrights,” said MPAA Pres. Dan Glickman. MPAA, which helped found the company, will be its outside manager and technology consultant. “There are thousands of new concepts floating around the high tech community about how to develop tools to fight piracy,” Glickman said: “Researching and developing these technologies now will help save the major studios and other motion pictures producers and distributors money in the future.” The high-tech developments will “prove invaluable” in researching peer-to-peer technologies as a way to protect movies and other audiovisual works from unauthorized access or misuse, Glickman said.
L.A.-based Movielabs is modeled on CableLabs, which since 1988 has participated in cable innovations like cable modems, digital video and use of fiber in delivery of cable programming. Its identity will remain separate from the companies that finance it, a spokeswoman said. The Medialabs board, made up of representatives from the founding studios, will oversee operations and set priorities. Movielabs will rely on outside technologists -- some of whom have pitched content protection solutions to the studios and MPAA -- for R&D ideas in the nonprofit’s core areas.
CableLabs Pres. Dick Green was encouraged to see the studios coming together to break new ground in their industry, much like his group did for cable, he said. “This is the kind of trend that we applaud because having an organization that represents the interests of the whole, especially the technical position of an industry, is very, very helpful,” he said: “We naturally feel good about our model finding a broader application in other industries.” Industry sources told us any kind of collaborative R&D effort of this nature requires a solid game plan from the start and ample funding. The initial contributions from the studios are adequate, the sources indicated.
This isn’t the movie industry’s first R&D partnership. Studios formed the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) in March 2002 to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema. In July, that group said it had completed the final overall system requirements and specifications to help theatrical projector and equipment manufacturers create uniform digital cinema equipment in the U.S.