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Film fests in high-tech battle against piracy
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PROTECTION of film copies is one of the largest concerns of film festivals around the world, as pirated copies often appear on the market only days after movies were premiered at festivals.
It is also a major worry at the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), which ends on Sunday and is China’s greatest and most international movie fest.
Organizers have taken a series of complicated and rigorous precautions in examining, transporting and showing more than 380 copies to fight piracy. During the film festival, about 1,000 screenings make it a challenging task to protect the copies.
“The procedure, the way we fulfill our duties, guarantees that there will be no leak,” Xu Jing, manager of the Shanghai Film Technology Factory, tells Shanghai Daily.
“In some cases, tapes are sent from countries where the security system is not as good, and we make sure that pirates can take absolutely no advantage during the procedure when the copies are in our hands.”
The factory is in charge of protecting the copyrights through its responsibility in six stages — standard technology regulations, detection of digital DCP (Data Collection Platform) copies, the contact of DCP AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) code, qualification of tape copies, detection of theater project system and technical consulting.
All films, after being examined by the factory, are stored in a central system, from which technicians can view and listen to the content, but are technically banned from copying the content from the system.
Apart from the day-to-day duties, this factory also needs to deal with all sorts of contingencies. For example, the digital copy of “The Keeper of Lost Causes” (2013) by Danish director Mikkel Norgaard came all the way from Denmark and arrived on May 30 after two weeks, only to be found broken after two weeks in transportation.
In order to make it for the screening, the factory assigned a specialist to fly over and pick up the new copy in person.
The brand new digital copy arrived on June 5. Similar cases occurred with other movies, such as the copy for South Korean film “The Fatal Encounter” (2014) and American film “Labor Day” (2014).
The appearance of pirated copies only days after they premier at film festivals indicate major leaks in the chain of transportation and management. While the pirates are able to make enormous profits, the film’s box office and staff involved in the movies are often seriously harmed by the pirated copies.
Due to the long, complicated path of a film between completion of production and premiering in a cinema, it’s hard to figure out where the leaks are.
Due to the severity and the urgency of this phenomenon, measures are taken to combat piracy. Actions include use of the public encryption algorithm AES, a military-level one-on-one secret key that links one film copy to one server. Theaters have to request for AES for each coming movie. Without this key and this particular server assigned, films cannot be pulled up for screening. Thus even if the files are stolen, without the security key and that particular machine designated to display the film, the file cannot be pulled up for viewing or copying.
Meanwhile, every security key has an expiration date that lasts an average of one month. When movies “expire,” they cannot even be displayed in cinemas.
Such strict rule further proved the rigor of major processes in protecting the films, and thus avoiding the possibility of copycat during the film festival.
With movie piracy a worldwide problem, China is not the only country fighting it. Multiple measures have been taken to deal with piracy both at home and abroad. India has formed a special enforcement anti-piracy team with industries threatened by movie piracy to thwart the copycats.
“The enforcement teams are closely working with Internet service providers (ISPs) to identify pirates’ IP addresses. Raids were conducted across several places in India to curb this growing menace, with several movie pirates put behind bars already,” reported the Times of India.
Interestingly, another measure taken to prevent piracy is banning Google glass, a wearable computer, from theaters.
Owing to the tiny camera stored on Google glass’s frame, audiences wearing Google glass are occasionally suspected of filming the movie being shown in the cinema. Some worry that the device enables recording, which then makes it easy to pirate the movie.
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