Paran Balakrishnan: Pirates on the prowl

MY WORD!

Dan Glickman confesses openly that he never tires of watching The Godfather parts I and II, and that he has watched both blockbusters more than 100 times each. But one thing's for sure: Glickman, the avid movie buff will have less time than ever before to re-run his favourite flicks.

Instead, as the new sheriff of the Motion Pictures Association of America, he will be locked in a real life no-holds-barred battle to make sure that the movie industry isn't wiped out by the Internet and the newest technological devices that are being spawned every other day.

It's a battle that's hotting up and is about to get bloodier. As computing power soars downloading movies is no longer the preserve of techno-freaks and youthful computer junkies. In fact, even marginally computer-literate users can now download movies in a matter of minutes.

So, is the movie industry about to be thrown into turmoil as pirates unspool profits? That's what happened to the international music industry, which found itself outsmarted in technological terms by websites like Napster, Kazaa and scores of others like them.

The plot is slightly different in the movie industry. But the script could change swiftly as the world gets more comfortable with newer technologies and gets used to the idea of downloading movies and watching them on their PCs.

How many people, after all, will turn down the opportunity to watch a factory-fresh blockbuster in the comfort of their homes without paying for it?

The answer to that question might be in a recent survey conducted by the MPAA amongst PC users. It was a limited sample size survey but showed that 25 per cent of those surveyed had already downloaded movies illegally.

If that wasn't bad enough, in South Korea, a nation that's ahead of the curve on techno-usage, six out of 10 had downloaded films from the Internet.

More alarmingly, for the MPAA, nobody felt they had committed a crime or done anything wrong in any way.

Nevertheless, this won't be a re-run of what happened in the international music industry. And that's largely because the MPAA has gone stealthily on the offensive in the last few years.

Inevitably, it has lost some battles. Take, for instance, its headline-getting effort to stop Jon Johansen, the teenage son of a Norwegian postman, from posting a technology called DeCSS on the Internet. The MPAA lost its battle in a Norwegian appeal court and "DVD Jon" as its young opponent is now called went scot-free.

But the MPAA has won bigger battles closer to home. It has come out victorious in high-profile court battles and it has pushed for a slew of new legislation that makes it tougher to download movies. One of its attorneys Russell Frackman was the music industry's battering ram when it went into a head-on battle with online music-maker Napster.

Earlier this year Frackman won a hotly-contested battle against 321 Studios, a maverick company based in Missouri, US that makes equipment which allows users to make copies of DVDs. 321 argued that people could legitimately make back-up copies of DVDs they had bought. Frackman's winning argument was that you, "don't get two when you pay for one".

In other ways too, the MPAA led by its redoubtable chief Jack Valenti "" he hands over to Glickman on September 1 after a 38-year reign "" has played a canny hand.

It has pushed for all types of legislation and it has smartly pushed some through state legislatures in the US instead of risking greater scrutiny at the federal level in the Senate or the House of Representatives.

The music industry reckoned that sales tumbled by about 14 per cent from its peak in 1999 because of illegal downloads. But technology has come to the music industry's rescue in the form of companies like the highly successful iTunes.

Nevertheless, movie industry executives know they could eventually face a High Noon shoot-out like their colleagues in the recording industry once did. The only question is whether they can stave off the technological challenge and they are sure that the behind-the-onscreen duel will go in their favour.