This script will now self-destruct: how Hollywood fights piracy

[Len]

It sounds like the plot of a spy movie with self-destructing files, tamper-proof documents, incongruous code-names and high-level encryption.

These devices are real, however: they are the tactics deployed by the film industry in its “good versus evil” battle against pirates.

With the cost of piracy to Hollywood approaching $30 billion (£22 billion) annually, the biggest film studios have increased their efforts to prevent “intellectual property” leaking out. They are fighting against a rising tide of digital innovation that offers ever greater opportunities to download scripts, images and finished films illegally. To win the war the studios have turned to a range of ingenious techniques.

Disney, for example, prints its Star Wars scripts for cast members on a dark red paper that makes printing legible copies impossible. Each one is counted out and in. The cast of Captain America: Civil War were similarly made to hand in scripts at the end of the day, at which time they were shredded.

For the Game of Thrones television series cast members were presented with digital copies of the script for each scene. Once the scene was completed, the scripts disappeared.

“They’re very, very strict,” the actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said in an interview with Elite Daily. “We actually get the scripts and then when we’ve shot the scene . . . it just vanishes. It’s like Mission: Impossible, ‘this will self-destruct’.”

Each script of The Hunger Games trilogy had a few words changed, allowing studio executives to trace any leaked copy. Sometimes big movies are known by codenames. The superhero blockbuster The Avengers was known during development as “Group Hug”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Charles Rivkin, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the six biggest studios, said that the industry’s “lifeblood” was its content.

“When you steal from creative companies you put people out of work,” he told The Times. “This is a fight you have to fight. It is an ongoing battle and the battle takes different forms and shapes every year but we are going to be evolving to meet those shapes.”

Through the MPAA the six Hollywood studios, Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros, have teamed up with other big players such as Amazon, Netflix, BBC and Sky to form the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment which targets the “pirates” distributing content. Mr Rivkin said he had met the UK culture ministers Matt Hancock and Margot James who had “similar interests in fighting piracy”. He wants to avoid the situation in the Nollywood film industry in Nigeria and India’s Bollywood where “movies are stolen literally the moment they are made”.

“It goes for Europe as well,” he added. “The root of economic success is innovation and creativity and if your product is going to be stolen as soon as it is brought to market, whatever industry you are in, it is going to put a dampener on economic growth. So anybody who cares about economic growth should care about intellectual property.”

The organisation has targeted piracy websites in various countries, last month blocking more than 50 in Singapore alone. It has even spread its message through exercises on the school curriculum in the United States. According to Wired, the exercises contained prompts for children such as: “Think about the art you made. How would you feel if your art was used without your permission?”

Mr Rivkin, who became chairman and chief executive of the MPAA last year after serving in the State Department and as the US ambassador to France, said that the blockchain technology used for transactions in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin had the potential to transform the industry.

“Blockchain is an extraordinary technology that I think is going to be disruptive and productive in any number of industries,” he said. “I think it is too early to tell, and I am no expert, but it might help a lot with secure distribution of product digitally and it might help in our fight against piracy.”

MOST PIRATED
 

• Game of Thrones Its success has led it to be dubbed the most illegally downloaded TV show of all time. The monitoring site TorrentFreak said the season six finale was shared across 350,000 torrents simultaneously.
• Avatar The 2009 sci-fi epic directed by James Cameron is the highest grossing film of all time and also the most pirated, with an estimated 21 million illegal downloads.
• Donald Trump It’s not just TV and film that are pirated. Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s inside account of life in Donald Trump’s White House, became so successful that bookstands ran out. This fuelled the e-book being shared illegally online.