Hollywood studios unite in piracy battle

The six major studios agree to jointly finance a multimillion-dollar research lab as part of an effort to foil pirates.

Sept. 26, 2005 9:00 a.m. PT

4 min read

LOS ANGELES--The six major Hollywood studios, hoping to gain more control over their technological destiny, have agreed to jointly finance a multimillion-dollar research laboratory to speed the development of new ways to foil movie pirates.

The new nonprofit consortium is to be called Motion Picture Laboratories--MovieLabs for short--and will begin operation later this year. According to Hollywood executives involved in its establishment, MovieLabs will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years. The idea arose out of Hollywood's contention that the consumer electronics and information technology industries are not investing heavily or quickly enough in piracy-fighting technology.

The lab is modeled after CableLabs, which since 1988 has spearheaded pivotal innovations in the cable television industry--hastening the adoption of fiber optics, cable modems, telephony and digital video. Hollywood's version will begin with a more modest mandate, said Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. It will focus principally on piracy prevention, though it will be given some flexibility to expand its mission later, he said.



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"We're not going to research how to make certain types of movies; that's not what we're talking about here," said Glickman.

He had been pressed, he said, by the studio chairmen to set up MovieLabs, an idea that had lain dormant for several years. "Our highest priority is protecting the integrity of our product."

Still, with the ways of delivering video to consumers proliferating at a rapid clip, that means a broad range of study. The initial projects planned for MovieLabs include studying these problems or devising these solutions:

• Ways to jam camcorders being used inside movie theaters, or to project movies with flickering images that are invisible to the eye but will appear on unauthorized video recordings.

• Network management technologies to detect and block illegal file transfers on campus and business networks.

• Traffic analysis tools to detect illegal content sharing on peer-to-peer networks.

• Ways to prevent home and personal digital networks from being tapped into by unauthorized users, while not preventing consumers from sending a movie to more than one TV set without having to pay for it each time.

• Ways to link senders and receivers of movies transmitted over the Internet to geographic and political territories, to monitor the distribution of movies and prevent the violation of license agreements.

James N. Gianopulos, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, which led the studios in pushing for MovieLabs, said it would ideally fill in what he said were gaps in research on content protection left by consumer electronics companies and Silicon Valley. That, in turn, would encourage Hollywood to embrace new ways of delivering movies to consumers--making those new vehicles more marketable.

"It allows us to develop more ways of getting creative content into the home, to mobile devices, theaters and so forth, without exposing us to more sources of theft," Gianopulos said. "The more comfort you have in the security of the content, the more able you are to expand the consumer's access to it."

Glickman echoed that, saying consumer-electronics and information technology companies may not see "an immediate commercialization, but to us it's important."

"We have different objectives here," Glickman said. "That's why the Pentagon set up DARPA, knowing that the companies wouldn't do it on their own," he added, referring to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Hollywood studios have teamed up on research and development before, most recently in the Digital Cinema Initiative, through which the major studios combined with the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California here to write uniform specifications for and test digital movie distribution technology.

Dick Green, president and chief executive of CableLabs, which was closely studied by motion picture association executives, said its approach to each technological problem or need was the same: reach an industrywide consensus on the direction to take, work with manufacturers to develop an approach, refine a set of specifications into an industry standard and help manufacturers develop and test prototypes.

"We help in the lab and in testing, and as part of incubation," Green said. "The minute it becomes a competitive product, we exit."

Like CableLabs, the Hollywood consortium will have its own chief executive who will report to the studio chairmen, not to the motion picture association, Glickman said.