May 12, 2002	Sunday	Safar 28, 1423

LOS ANGELES, May 11: The countdown has begun to next week’s opening of the latest “Star Wars” instalment, but digital pirates have already launched their own clone attack by swapping bootleg copies of the blockbuster on the Internet.

As a result, up to a million people might have seen “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” before its much-hyped opening on Thursday, experts said on Friday, underlining the urgent nature of the piracy problem for Hollywood studios.

“Here you have what everyone expected to be one of the biggest films of the year, but it will already have been seen by a million people,” said Bruce Forest, an independent media technology consultant and an expert on piracy.

Forest said he first detected the swapping of bootleg copies of the movie on Wednesday on the Internet Relay Chat, a network of global chat networks that enables peer-to-peer file-sharing, which is popular among programmers and hackers.

“Yesterday, it was absolutely maniacal. I was on the IRC all day and it was being put through all the different channel groups,” said Forest, who noted the film was starting to trickle into more mainstream channels by Thursday morning.

Industry sources believe the bootleg version may have been made at a private screening of the “Star Wars” film, using a tripod-mounted digital camcorder pointed at the screen.

The problem is a growing one for Hollywood, with research firm Viant Corp. estimating that more than 350,000 copies of films are illegally downloaded each day.

Movie studios, fearing they could be next industry to suffer the sort of damage inflicted on the music business by free Internet song-swap service Napster, have banded together to form legitimate Internet movie ventures as well as launch a legal offensive against such pirates.

Lucasfilm Ltd, the producer of “Star Wars”, and 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp. Ltd., which is distributing the film, referred calls to the Movie Picture Association, an industry trade group leading the fight against piracy.

‘GROWING EPIDEMIC’: “This is a problem we’re seeing more and more of ahead of openings large and small,” said Richard Taylor, a spokesman for the trade group. “There’s a growing epidemic of Internet piracy of motion pictures and its this kind of activity that stands as one of the obstacles to legitimate online offerings.”

Industry observers were split on whether the bootlegging could hurt box office receipts during the movie’s opening weekend.

Copies of “Spider-Man” for instance also premiered on the Internet ahead of its debut, which turned out to be the biggest opening of all time with $114 million in North American ticket sales in its first three days in release last weekend.

“This will likely not have any substantial impact on the box office revenues. This is a big theater movie and not one you’re going to want to watch sitting around your PC on a Friday night,” said P.J. McNealy, an analyst with GartnerG2.

McNealy said he believes the Web traffic could actually help drive the hype surrounding the film, but others, including the studios, believe the cloning could work the other way.

“If people don’t like it, it may affect the box office. It’s already being heavily discussed on chat rooms and what viewers say may convince those people who are sitting on the fence about seeing it,” said Forest.

Many experts agreed the piracy could also bite into the sales of videos and DVDS, which typically account for a huge portion of a studio’s profits on a movie.

“I would imagine that the availability of any motion picture on the Net for free would certainly displace some people who would have otherwise gone to the movie or bought the DVD,” said Chuck Sims, an attorney has represented Hollywood studios.

REPORT CARDS: Critics’ report cards are in for “Star Wars Episode II”, and they do not give the movie high marks.

Though most reviewers agreed that the 140-million-dollar movie was better than its critically-panned predecessor, they still blasted the movie’s acting, dialogue and storyline.

“While ‘Attack of the Clones’ is many things - a two-hour-and-12- minute action-figure commercial, a demo reel heralding the latest advances in digital filmmaking, a chance for gifted actors to be handsomely paid for delivering the worst line readings of their careers,” wrote New York Times critic A.O. Scott, “it is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.”—Reuters/dpa