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FEATURE
VIDEO PIRACY
COPY
If you want to see Brannagh’s
Frankenstein, Natural Born Killers, or any of the latest Hollywood blockbusters
right now you’ve got two choices; you can either jump on a 747 to the US, or if
you’re a bit short this week, get down to your local car boot sale. Pirate video
copies of movies that will not see the insides of UK cinemas for several months
-- maybe never -- are freely available
at many of the seven thousand boot sales held up and down the country every
week, often costing no more than five or six pounds.
Video piracy is one of
those apparently victimless crimes, it’s been going on for as long as there
have been video recorders, but according to Reg Dixon of the Federation Against
Copyright Theft (FACT); ‘piracy is costing the UK film industry alone over £250
million each year, it’s on the increase now that effective legislation has
driven video piracy out of the high-street and into unregulated car boot sales
and fly-pitches’. Even so, it’s still difficult for many people to reconcile lost
box office receipts with real crime. But there are victims, the people who buy
the movies for one. Most pirate videos are almost unwatchable, and the junk
tape a lot of them are recorded on can do real harm to VCRs.
Piracy continues to thrive
despite the determined best efforts of FACT; the police and local trading
standards officials who have seized half a million counterfeit tapes so far
this year. Street markets and car boot sales are raided regularly but,
complains Reg Dixon ‘the traders may receive little more than a ticking off,
the judiciary still regard offenders as little more than errant barrow boys’.
However, if convicted to the full extent of the law pirates can expect stiff fines,
up to £5,000 and or up to two years imprisonment; there are even longer prison sentences
for those who fall foul of other laws applicable to piracy.
It’s big business -- even a
small scale copying operation can turn over £50,00 in a week -- in one undercover
operation FACT recorded one street trader taking over £700 in just 17 minutes.
FACT have also uncovered evidence that there are well established links between
video piracy with organised crime and terrorism. Unfortunately for the authorities
piracy is almost unstoppable, it ranges in scope from factory-sized operations
with 150 or more copying machines working around the clock, to individuals
running off a copy of the latest rental movie for their friends.
Copying video tapes is a reasonably
simple business, all you need is two VCRs plus a set of copying leads. It’s all
quite legal, provided you don’t duplicate copyright material, but where do master
recordings come from, and in particular those movies that haven’t been released
in the UK? In a few cases films that have been released on tape or disc in the
US are imported ahead of their UK theatrical release. Once in the country a PAL
copy is made using a standards converter VCR. In fact legitimate video copies
of movies are made for a variety of purposes, including unfinished post
production studio tapes which have found their way into the hands of pirates. Tapes
made for airlines, distribution to private cinemas and overseas market have all
been used as source material. Once a movie has gone on general release to
cinemas it’s prey to all kinds of chicanery; prints mysteriously disappear from
projection booths overnight, projectionists have been known to make copies and quite
a few master tapes have been shot on domestic camcorders, smuggled into movie
theatres.
Even if lining the pockets
of villains and depriving Hollywood moguls of a few bob doesn’t worry you the
quality issue should. Almost without exception pirate tapes are rubbish. They’re
copied on domestic VCRs, and you can be sure they won’t be well-maintained stereo
machines; at best a pirate tape will have a hissy mono soundtrack -- if you’re
lucky -- and you can forget any thoughts about Dolby Surround. Even if the
master recording was obtained from a cinema print, using a professional telecine
machine (and that’s really not very likely...), then the finished tape will be a
second-generation copy, though it’s more likely to be three or more generations
removed from the original. There will be a drastic loss of detail in the
picture, giving it a fuzzy appearance, the colour signal will be unstable and full
of noise, and there’s a better than even chance the synchronisation pulses,
that keep the picture steady, will be shot to hell, making the picture jump or
roll. That’s a best case scenario. It’s more likely the master recording was
dubbed from a illicitly obtained VHS copy, which itself is a second generation
recording, so by the time it reaches the market stall it’s four generations
down the line. It gets worse, copies made using domestic camcorders will almost
certainly be incorrectly exposed, and more often than not the soundtrack is
made using the camcorder’s own microphone; so if it was recorded in the cinema
you may get accompanying sound effects from popcorn wrappers and the audience.
There’s a very real
possibility that you’ll end up damaging your VCR with a pirate movie. There’s
no way of knowing what sort of tape the recording was made on, but you can be
sure it won’t be fresh out of the box from a top-name manufacturer. The chances
are it will be a cheap second grade import, maybe even from a rejected or
recycled job lot; several cases of pirated children’s cartoons over-recorded on
hard-core porn tapes have been reported by distressed parents. Dust and contaminants
on the tape can clog the heads in a VCR in seconds, leading to expensive
repairs. If the tape turns out to be a dud, or it screws up in your VCR who are
you going to complain to? It’s usually no good returning to the boot market to
confront the seller, you’ll be lucky to find them there two weeks running. Pirate
tape vendors tend to move around, for obvious reasons. Local trading standards
offices won’t have much sympathy for you either, in fact he best advice we can
give is not to bother with them in the first place, buying a pirate tape could
turn out to be a lot more expensive than you’ve bargained for, and we promise
you it won’t be worth watching!
REVIEWS
We all want to see the latest movies, and everyone is a
sucker for a bargain but as we discovered after visiting several large car boot
sales, pirate tapes are a real waste of money.
THE FLINTSTONES
£5.00, Sunday car boot, Lakeside Thurrock, Essex
This is almost certainly a second or third generation dub, converted
from a US laserdisc, judging by the logos during the intro sequence. The picture
is fairly stable, though the letterboxing wanders in and out of the picture and
the tape has a lot of dropout. Resolution is very poor with excessive streaking
on highlights, it’s so bad it’s almost impossible to read the credits. The contrast
range is very narrow, colours are dull, muted and very noisy. The soundtrack is
barely audible and there’s an annoying high-pitched whine in the background. The recording seems to have
been made on a machine with an excitable automatic gain control as the level varies
wildly. One of the more imaginative tape box inserts, complete with a Columbia
Tristar logo, (even though it’s an MGA/UA movie), and a potted review, prised
from a magazine or newspaper.
Watchability 0
Collectability 0
FORREST GUMP
£6.00, Sunday car boot, Rainham, Essex
Not a lot of good, no sound. The recording appears to have
been made using a camcorder, there’s a tell-tale time readout in the bottom
right hand corner of the screen, though it doesn’t appear to have been shot in
a cinema; a spot of unauthorised overtime by a projectionist possibly. Picture
quality is slightly better than average, this is probably only a third
generation copy, but the lack of sound means it’s simply not worth watching.
The cassette inlay has a similar look and feel to the one used on the Flintstones
-- it even has the same Columbia Tri-Star code, suggesting they’re from the
same source -- but this time the sleeve
notes makes little or no sense.
Watchability 0
Collectability 0
THE LION KING
£5.00 Sunday car boot Lakeside Thurrock, Essex
Very sad! Cartoons sometimes fare better than normal movies
in the copying process but this bright, vibrant and truly wonderful Disney
creation has been reduced to a nasty looking blur by the pirates, and would be
a big disappointment for any child unlucky enough to sit through it. Another
very amateurish effort with the letterboxing badly aligned in the frame. The resonating
sound suggests it may have been shot on a camcorder inside a movie theatre.
Colours are muted to the point where they’re almost indistinguishable, and the
tape used is a very inferior type with excessive dropout and noise. The cassette has a crude, hand-written label
and the case inlay is a pathetic photocopy of a press ad.
Watchability 0
Collectability 0
WOLF
£6.00, Sunday car boot, West Wickham, Kent.
Jack would not be happy! The origins of this tape are
unclear but burnt into the picture are the words ‘Prop of Col/TSP’, presumably that
means Columbia Tristar Pictures, who made the film. The copy quality is poor,
it’s probably a third generation recording, and it’s been made on a lousy tape
with excessive dropout. The picture is very soft with little detail, and
colours are all over the place, especially in the darker scenes; the mood and
menace of the film are lost, even if you manage to follow what’s going on. The
sound is horrible, hissy and uneven. Another hand-written label, this time
without any sort of inlay.
Watchability 1
Collectability 0
FRANKENSTIEN
£6.00 Sunday car boot, Wrotham, Kent
The master for this recording was almost certain derived
from a bootleg studio tape, a black panel towards the bottom of the screen is concealing
a code or ID number, so it’s origins cannot be easily traced. The market
stallholder had a table full of fairly convincing-looking copies, though on
closer inspection the cassette inserts looked like poor quality colour
photocopies. The tape we brought came from the back of his car and was in a
plain white sleeve. The movie is a real
nightmare, though it’s got nothing to do with the plot, pitcture quality is
atrocious, fuzzy detail hardly any colour and our copy had serious tracking
errors, it short it was unwatchable .
NATURAL BORN KILLERS
£6.00 Sunday car Boot, Wrotham, Kent
There’s no need to be worried about being corrupted or depraved
by watching the pirate version of this movie, you can barely make out what’s going
on. The images are disturbing right enough, but the only feelings of violence
you get after watching it are towards the rip-off merchant who sold it to you. At
a guess this is a third or fourth generation dub from a laser disc, judging by
the freeze-frame start and letterboxing. It came from the same stall as Frankenstien,
so there’s been no attempt at packaging, or dressing it up. A sad waste of tape,
and money.
---end---
1994 0811
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