Hollywood Robbery

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Many Americans who download movies and buy pirate copies insist that doing so has no effect on their legitimate movie-buying or theatergoing habits. But it would be foolish for Hollywood to ignore the grim prophecy of the music industry where album sales have dropped 16% since 2000. Right now, the movie industry's guardian angel is slow technology. Seasoned downloaders on a broadband connection generally need eight hours or more to download a film. But 18 months from now, it may take only 2 1/2 hours, according to calculations by BigChampagne. Eventually, "if you can download a movie with sophisticated sight and sound in seconds and have it in your library, you're not going to buy that in a DVD store. Anyone with even a paltry understanding of human nature understands that," says Jack Valenti, head of the M.P.A.A.

The weekend of the sneak preview, Brandon got hourly updates from the studio's Internet-monitoring firm, hoping not to hear that Samurai had been scattered across the globe. The off-site security firm (which requested that it not be named) scanned file-trading networks 24 hours a day. It can fire off letters warning Internet service providers about misbehaving users, but its main weapon is the decoy file, which it dispatched by the tens of thousands. Downloaders spent hours pulling down the bait, only to find a mess of ones and zeros. Bored wannabe pirates added to the mass distraction, posting bogus files to get attention and create havoc. The week before the film's release, TIME staffers found online Samurais that turned out to be Scary Movie 3 , Santa Clause 2 and a porn flick.

By the Monday after the film's sneak preview, no pirate copies had surfaced. "It was a pretty amazing feat," Brandon says now, as if describing a matter of national security. "The movie very easily could have been compromised."

In fact, it wasn't until Dec. 6 that Brandon finally got the dreaded call. Around 2 p.m., he learned that Samurai was online, just one day after its release in theaters. In this day and age, that is a victory which reflects how badly the studios are losing the war. That first pirate of Samurai was from a camcorder copy made in a U.S. theater on the day the movie premiered. Warner Bros. has identified the theater using tracking codes hidden in the film but declined to reveal the information, citing ongoing legal investigations. After years of resisting the hard line taken by the music industry, the studio recently decided to take off the gloves and pursue civil litigation against pirates. The M.P.A.A., meanwhile, is investigating 23 American theaters where camcording has occurred. (The first person to be federally charged for camcording, Johnny Ray Gasca, jumped bail two weeks ago in California.)

The Samurai copy was posted online under the pirate logo MPT one of the so-called release groups that upload films and have their own hierarchy. Currently, MPT also claims to have online bootlegs of Paycheck , Big Fish and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King . Beyond the desire to get something for nothing, serious downloaders relish the technology of pirating for technology's sake. "I'm a geek," says one Indian student living in France. "There's a thrill of it. The first movie I downloaded, it was quite a kick it was My Big Fat Greek Wedding ." The day Samurai appeared online, a dozen downloaders posted reviews of the pirate copy. "Video is a little grainy, nothing too bad, color is dead on," wrote someone calling himself Freeder. "Watched this at the theater last night ... glad I can watch it again without paying $20," added another.

Once a movie leaks, duplicating plants begin churning out discs by the thousand. Two and a half years ago, hard copies would hit the street about a week after theatrical releases. Today they're usually out in 48 hours. On Dec. 13, a TIME reporter bought Samurai from a stall along Taweewong Road in Phuket, Thailand. "We've had Last Samurai for three days already," said vendor Nook (not his real name). At his booth, just 50 yards from an official Warner Bros. store, Samurai was available with Thai, Chinese or Bahasa Indonesia subtitles. Business has improved, Nook says, since police stopped shaking him down for a monthly $60 payoff. Now he pays just $150 a year for an official ID card. Piracy has become so normalized that it has its own bureaucracy. Two days later, a reporter bought Samurai in Shanghai. The shopkeeper, who introduced himself as Mr. Wang, displayed thousands of pirated DVDs from Hitchcock to Schwarzenegger. The DVD cost $1. It arrived the day before, via pedicab. "If you want to wait a few months, you can come back for a better version," said Mr. Wang.

Piracy is so rampant in parts of Asia that even the pirates have problems with piracy. In Taipei, a copy of Samurai purchased over the phone for $1.76 features the logo "HLW production team/Production: KC" in the upper right-hand corner of the image. The group attached its pirate mark so it can police its own product, speculates Michael Ellis, vice president of Asia-Pacific antipiracy operations for the M.P.A.A. "From a criminal point of view, if someone is taking away your market share, that's a problem." (The Chinese-character subtitles were not always of professional quality. When Tom Cruise says "I would happily kill you for free," it is translated as "At any time, I can back off.") Copies bought in Moscow and New Delhi even list addresses for the pirate "copyright holders." They are likely fake, added to help slip bootlegs past customs agents, Ellis says.