From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Sorry, Screeners
In the war against film piracy, some must pay a (small) price.
Utter the word "screener" to the vast majority of Americans and you will get a "What'd you say?" response, or they will talk about airport security. But in places where film award ceremonies are the buzz, "screener" has a different and vital-signs meaning.
For the past dozen years or so, during the awards season that begins after the first of the year, the major studios have sent screeners--videotapes or DVDs of movies that have gone or will go into exhibition that year--to pretty much every group of awards voters here and abroad to give them a convenient way to evaluate the films. Each recipient last year received a wagonload of free films in DVD or VHS format (the choice of the recipient), and the total amount of mailed screeners was in the hundreds of thousands. It is a nice gift that has become a kind of birthright to those who receive them, including me.
Last year, the MPAA antipiracy department discovered that of the 68 titles sent out last year, 34 were pirated, and wound up mostly in Asia and Russia, where they were stamped into counterfeit DVDs and flung around the world. Recipients of screeners weren't engaged in piracy. But most of them, as I did, gave some movies to relatives and friends who in turn gave them to friends, who gave them to friends, and somewhere in that chain the pirates pounced.
Obviously, screener piracy is a small part of global piracy. But to ignore this visible, confirmable thievery was not a choice, as piracy has become a central concern of the movie industry. Therefore, upon my recommendation, the major studios announced a ban on screeners.
This decision caused loud dismay and rising anger from just about everyone in the cinema world, an eruption that by Hollywood standards ranked with Vesuvius. For when free movies sent to your home are no longer available--and you have to get out of the house to go to a theater--it is not cheerful news for those accustomed to the privilege. Then, on Oct. 10, an ad was published in Variety, signed by the most famous film artists in the world, including Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola, Jodie Foster, Norman Jewison and Martin Scorsese. Most were good friends of mine, which caused me to wonder if there might be a middle ground between no screeners and mass distribution. Technical experts from the MPAA and the companies looked at alternatives, such as online delivery, but none worked--though we hope antipiracy weapons will emerge in the not-so-distant future.
At that moment Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, producers of the Academy Awards, called me with an idea for that middle ground. We talked it over, and I put the plan we designed before the studios. After nearly two weeks of intense discussion, the studios and their subsidiaries unanimously agreed on a one-year experiment, the results of which would influence their decision next year.
Mr. Pierson would send to each Academy member a document for signature. The member would receive screeners from the studios with the following provisions: (1) that the screeners, sent in VHS format only, would not leave the member's home, (2) that the member understands the studios reserve the right to identify/watermark the cassettes, (3) that the member is aware that if a screener is pirated and traced back to the member, he or she will be expelled from the Academy. Any member will confirm that this is a severe penalty.
We knew this wouldn't satisfy everyone, particularly other groups with awards ceremonies. They still won't receive screeners. But piracy is a fact plain and real, with the unwanted prospect of its rapid spread in the future. Antipiracy must take precedence over everything. Current conservative estimates indicate that the film industry loses $3.5 billion each year to hard-goods piracy (counterfeit DVDs, VHS tapes and optical discs). That figure does not take into account the damage done by online piracy.
The digital world with its zeroes and ones and perfect copies of originals has changed the movie landscape forever, which is why the movie world's priorities have been permanently altered. The industry wants to use the Internet to dispatch films to consumers. But as we do, we must also challenge piracy and defeat it with every weapon we can summon--and we will succeed, I am convinced--or one day we will sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the decline and fall of America's greatest artistic triumph and an awesome engine of job and economic growth.
Mr. Valenti is president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
