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 Once again at the helm of a mixed bunch of foreign lawyers
at the BU law school, we are reminded of how topical and unresolved is
the legal area of copyright protection, intellectual property rights
and electronic distribution, especially in the international arena.
However, from an Ivy encrusted broadband fortress it is easy to ignore
or forget the way in which this issue impacts the lives of literally
billions of the planets inhabitants on a daily basis. We are talking
about the emergence of Video CD’s as the main mode of penetration for
Hollywood and major studio motion pictures into the poorer regions of
the world.
The Dowbrigade has just returned from several months in the Third World,
and we must say that the breath and depth of the penetration is breathtaking. In
towns and villages as small as a few hundred people, there is now a brisk
sale in illegal Video CD’s, with awareness of and demand for the latest
releases. In the cities there are city blocks and entire districts dedicated
to the illegal movies trade.
The most incredible aspect is the speed with which the illegal copies
appear. Not only movies which have not come out on DVD in the States
yet, but movies that are still in the first-run theaters! When the blockbuster
"The Day After Tomorrow" came out in the US on a Friday, by the following
Monday – THREE DAYS LATER – decent copies were selling like hotcakes
in the Andean market town of Huaraz.
 The economics
speak for themselves. Going to see a movie in a
movie theater in South America costs about $2.50-$3.50. A video CD with
a full length hollywood movie costs ONE DOLLAR, or three for two-fifty!
They use cheap media (note crack in brand-new copy of Dogtown!) so the
diskette itself probably only costs a few pennies. The rest is
distributed up and down the line. I
doubt Brad Pitt gets much for the copies of "Troya" that were selling
when I left last month.
The quality of the video image is, well, irregular, sometimes grainy
and jumpy and sometimes surprisingly good. The scan at the top
of this post is for a copy of Dog Town we picked up on our next
to last night in Guayaquil. Actually,
we took advantage of the 3 for $2.50 deal and got "Gothika", "Dogtown"
and "Hellboy". Demonstrating another danger of buying movies from street
vendors with no place to test them out, when we got back to the place
we were staying we discovered that the Gothika CD case actually held
a cinemagraphic gem called "The Last American Virgin". The next night
(our final) we hunted down the vendor and convinced him that he didn’t
want to have a pissed off Dowbrigade on his case, what with all of our
connections to shady characters in high places. We got Gothika.
 The shoddy materials are evident in the printing on the cover; it is
blurry, faded and in many spots illegible (see closeup). And the quality
of the CD’s themselves leaves something to be desired. Witness the final
scan, of the Dogtown CD after we tried carefully, and unsuccessfully,
to pry it from the cheap plastic case.
And we really wanted to see that one! And who is behind this nefarious
business, ripping off virtuous American companies like Miramax and Tombstone
Productions and hard working artists like Julia Roberts and Adam Sandler?
A clue is provided, at least on a national scale, by the news that while
we were in Peru there was a well-publicized bust of a member of the national
legislature
who
was
the titular owner
of 7 large seagoing containers which had arrived at Callao, the nations
grandest port, full of – blank CD’s. About 20 million of them.
Go figure.
This illegal industry is a truly global, almost instantaneous media
distribution system. We would be willing to bet that its product reaches
within a very short time, an absolute majority of the people on the planet.
It employs hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people around the
world. And it serves as a cultural spigot, spraying American fashions
and humor and values out helter-skelter to screens everywhere, for better
or worse.
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