LONDON, March 15: A few enterprising — and potentially illegal — eBay traders are gearing up for the Oscars this weekend, auctioning off pirated versions of top film nominees, some priced at less than a ticket and popcorn.
Many of the Academy Award hopefuls up for bid on eBay, which include “Monsters, Inc.”, “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, are not bound for the video store for weeks.
The activity comes at a particularly anxious time for media companies which are trying to identify and stamp out major sources of piracy for fear it will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business.
Lately, media moguls have sought help from US lawmakers and pleaded with consumers at public forums, including last month’s Grammy Awards, to refrain from swapping music and movie files over high-speed Internet connections.
On Friday, a trader on Ebay.co.uk, by the name of “Minimanmart” put up for bid “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”, an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture.
Carrying an opening bid price of 10 pounds ($14.26), the flick hadn’t received any bids in the first few hours. It carried the description: “Good quality on VCD (video CD). Works on any PC and most DVD players.”
To sweeten the bid, the seller said he wouldn’t charge for postage.
EBay’s user policy prohibits the listing of items that infringe copyright, trademark or intellectual property rights of third parties.
With millions of items up for auction daily on eBay, the company relies on its users to notify it of any questionable auction listings before it will consider removing it from the site, a company spokeswoman said.
“With ten million items up at any given time, it principally is impossible for us to police the entire site,” the spokeswoman said. She added that the company has categories such as food and firearms that are automatically prohibited. DVDs and VCDs are not on the list, she said.
Sure enough, a number of the auctions were suspended after newsmen contacted eBay on Friday. But one lucky bidder scored a VCD version of Harry Potter for five pounds on Thursday, the site showed.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Video CD, the format used to store many of the pirated movies, is a souped up compact disc that stores sound and full-motion video and can be played in most DVD players and on computers with a DVD-Rom or CD-Rom drive.
It’s become a favoured storing device for video pirates as evidenced by the dozens of VCD titles up for bid on the auction site from World War Two television drama “Band of Brothers”, which nabbed a top bid of 21 pounds on Friday, to the Michael Cain classic “Get Carter”, which fetched four bids.
Movies can be illegally obtained from a variety of sources, experts say, from something as crude as a camcorder being smuggled into a movie theatre to the theft of a movie reel from a studio or movie theatre.
Once removed, the material can be recorded to a computer and transported quickly and easily around the globe, most likely over the Internet via news groups or file-trading sites like Morpheus MusicCity and Kazaa.
Users of such sites can store the copyright protected materials on their computer and then copy, or “burn”, it to either a DVD, CD-Rom or Video CD.
British technology firm NetPD, which counts as its clients music labels, film studios and video game developers, recently conducted a probe that showed the pervasive nature of online piracy.
The company, which monitors online piracy activities, said it recorded 3.6 billion downloads in January on the most popular file-sharing sites including Morpheus MusicCity, Grokster, and Kazaa. Bruce Ward, technical director of NetPD, said the most popular movie downloads are “The Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter” and “American Pie 2”.
“This stuff is out there, all over the Internet,” he said.—Reuters