“I walked a five-block stretch of 8th Avenue in New York last week, and pulled about 6,000 copies of counterfeit DVDs from (retailers’) shelves,” Evil Angel vice president Chris Norman told XBiz. “Retailers need to know they are accountable for the purchase of pirated product.”
Norman simply eyeballed the product to see it wasn’t genuine. A signature style of wrapping was missing, he said, and that was enough for him to convince store owners to open the boxes, which revealed DVDs encoded in DVD-5 format rather than EA’s standard DVD-9.
“I said to the store owners, ‘We can do this like amiable businessmen or I can have marshals here on Monday morning to close your store down.’” Norman said. “Most were very cooperative.”
Evil Angel filed suit in U.S. District Court against Direct Distributors, a New York distributor of adult product. The Complaint alleges causes of action for copyright infringement, contributory infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition and seeks both injunctive relief and “millions of dollars” in statutory penalties.
As other companies’ representatives have stated, there are many methods of combatting piracy, each introduced at a different point in a title’s life cycle. DRM solutions like special pre-release encoding have been popular but, as Norman stated, “I have part of a warehouse full of Macrovision[-encoded] product that was compromised almost as soon as it was released.”
EA is considering adding embossed logos to the boxcovers as well as burning holograms onto the discs. In addition, each title is copyrighted and registered with the Library of Congress, at a cost of about $125 a title.
Norman noted that recent decreases in the price of DVD-R replication has led to increased privacy. He discounted DVD-Rs as a quality alternative, saying that image degeneration was apparent between master and copy.
Business analyst Christopher Lucy of Voxman Entertainment Marketing said, “Hundreds of thousands of these DVD-R movies have already been sold, and most people can’t tell the difference.”
“I can tell the difference,” Norman said. “The pictures aren’t nearly as crisp.”
Norman said that, like attorney Jeffery Douglas’ claim that every adult company will need a 2257 compliance officer, each company should have a person devoted to piracy prevention.
“It’s almost inevitable we’ll be up against piracy forever,” he said.