Wed, May 30, 2007 page4

• Hollywood scrambles over piracy spike

  CAM SCAM Motion Picture Association official Matthew Cheetham and the MOEA vowed to `educate' the viewing public as to what constitutes the pirating of movies

  • By Max Hirsch / STAFF REPORTER
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  A spike in camcorder piracy cases, or "camming," in movie theaters nationwide has Hollywood scrambling to educate moviegoers and the Taiwanese government amid fresh strains in US-Taiwan ties over the nation's intellectual property rights (IPR) violations.

  Tinseltown's operations point man in Asia, Motion Picture Association (MPA) Asia-Pacific regional president Matthew Cheetham, yesterday unveiled a short clip to air in theaters next week warning against "camming," which he described as a "trend." Camming -- producing bootleg video CDs by using a camcorder to film a movie as it plays -- is on the rise, according to an MPA press release.

  Of the total seven thwarted camcorder piracy cases in Taiwan in recent years, "five have occurred in the past 12 months," Cheetham said at a Taipei conference touting the clip.

  Representing the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) overseas, the MPA fights movie piracy locally through its Taipei office, the Foundation for the Protection of Film and Video Works.

  Flanked by Margaret Chen (陳淑美), secretary-general of the Intellectual Property Office under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), Cheetham and foundation officials vowed to "educate" the viewing public on what constitutes movie piracy.

  Their first step is the release of a 30-second clip featuring a ninja rappelling off a helicopter onto Taipei 101 in a lightning storm. The ninja's top-secret mission is to snatch a CD, but before he can steal it, the shot pans out onto moviegoers watching his exploits on the big screen.

  Among the audience is a man filming the movie with a camcorder. Police collar the man as the scene fades out.

  "The character may think he's pretty hot stuff," said foundation director Spencer Yang (楊泰順), referring to the man in the audience, "but, in the end, he gets caught. This is illegal behavior."

  Although Cheetham praised the government for cooperating with MPA and cracking down on piracy, camming is merely the latest problem in a long history of intellectual property rights violations here.

  Citing rampant piracy, US industries in February called for the US government to keep Taiwan on its annual "Special 301 Watch List."

  The US Trade Representative Office (USTR) has kept Taiwan on the list since 2001, and is unlikely to remove it as "peer-to-peer" sharing among Internet users continues to grow, leading to the highest rate of Internet infringement of business software in Asia, according to the US International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA).

  The trade representative office makes its decisions based on the alliance's suggestions.

  At the heart of rampant Internet piracy is the Ministry of Education (MOE), the alliance and MPA allege, saying that the Taiwan Academic Network (TANet), an Intranet run by the education ministry, is regularly abused by students who illegally download media files from the computer network.

  Half of all Taiwanese university students -- or 250,000 students -- use TANet to illegally download movies, Yang told the Taipei Times in February.

  Since the alliance has singled out the education ministry in its recommendation to the trade representative office to keep Taiwan on the list, however, the ministry has come around, MPA officials said yesterday.

  "The ministry is starting to focus on the problem," foundation official Frank Shih (施育霖) said. "We see progress."

  The intellectual property office, for example, has teamed up with the education ministry to form a task force to stamp out all forms of copyright infringement on campuses, Chen said. The task force will begin to address TANet abuse soon, she said.

  "The government here seems to understand that stamping out piracy isn't about protecting Hollywood," Cheetham said. "It's about safeguarding local creative enterprises."

  "Taiwan understands," he said. "It gets it."
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