A Brief Background in Video Piracy


Intellectual Property right issues are not solely limited to audio sources. Since the introduction of the videocassette recorder in the late 1970s, the threat that piracy would deplete all box office revenues has been present in the minds of all movie studio executives.

Needless to say, movie piracy became almost as popular with the videocassette as audio piracy became with the audiocassette. In nations with weak intellectual property laws (e.g., China), over 90% of all videos sold have been illegitimately reproduced. The MPAA estimates that movie studios lose $2.5 billion in revenue every year due to piracy, and that upwards of 10% of the 25,000 - 35,000 video stores in the United States sell pirated videocassettes. Additionally, a recent study found that nearly 14% of copies of prerecorded video tapes in the United States were illegitimate, and that over 30% of US VCR-owning households admitted to owning at least one unauthorized copy.

In order to combat this hemorrhaging of money, the MPAA enacted a program in 1975 with the goal to curb piracy with a dual-fronted attack:

In the past 15 years, this attack has manifested itself in several technologies, in addition to a significant Hollywood contribution to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The most ubiquitous technology currently employed is Macrovision, a copy protection system designed to stop the production of unauthorized VHS copies of copyrighted movies, documentaries, and sporting events. Unfortunately, Macrovision failed to completely curb piracy, and when the DVD format was introduced in 1997 a new technology, the Content Scrambling System (or CSS) was added as a purely digital system to fight the ever-increasing wave of piracy. As an additional measure, a region-coding system was employed, rendering US-purchased DVDs unplayable on Japanese, Australian, or European DVD players.