Petteri Pyyny
15 Sep 2003 15:59
A recent study published by the AT&T Labs revealed that most of the illegal copies of movies available on P2P networks have been "leaked" by the movie industry insiders, not by movie enthusiasts armed with digital camcorders.
Almost 80 percent of 300 copies of different movies found by the researchers on P2P networks, were apparently leaked to the Net by people working within the movie industry. According to AT&T Labs, this is the first study that tries to identify the sources of leaks for popular Hollywood movies. Nearly all of the movies in the study were found on the Net before their official U.S. DVD release date, some of them even before their movie theater release.
"Our conclusion is that the distributors really need to take a hard look at their own internal processes and look at how they can stop the insider leaks of their movies" before taking measures that might hamstring consumers' technologies and rights, said Lorrie Cranor, a researcher at AT&T Labs and lead author of the study.
This study sheds a very, very different light over DVD backup tools that movie industry is trying to outlaw all over the world (and have done so successfully in various countries already).
Source: New York Times (requires free registration)