Virtual bites: Digital piracy and Bollywood [India]

On a trip to Helsinki in Finland, Rajjat Barjatya stumbled upon 15,000 Indian families who had regular access to Bollywood movies even when no production house was distributing them there.
"The families were paying monthly rent to a website that delivered the latest pirated Bollywood content," says Barjatya, who figured that the Indian entertainment sector was being plagiarised and producers who were spending millions on marketing and publicity were being robbed, virtually.

"There was a huge gap in demand and supply of Bollywood content to NRIs settled all over the globe," adds Barjatya, the managing director of Rajshri Media, the digital arm of Rajshri Productions.

Today, Barjatya is doing a roaring business among the NRI population settled in the US, UK and Canada. Success speaks for Barjatya. Rajshri's blockbuster film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun has been viewed over 500,000 times till date and can be downloaded for $4.99.

The website hosts over 6,000 hours of premium video content, all of which has been licensed from India's leading content owners and can be streamed free, ad-supported and downloaded at a nominal price between $4.99 and $9.99.

Barjatya has also unveiled 90 webisodes and mobisodes, of three minutes each, that will be available for free online streaming and as mobile downloads for Idea subscribers.

Piracy of intellectual property is not new to the media and entertainment sector. However, the scale of the problem is definitely new-fangled. A recent study estimates that the Indian entertainment industry loses $4 billion and more than 800,000 jobs each year because of piracy.
Not ready to give up on digital distribution just yet, entertainment majors such as Rajshri Media, UTV, YashRaj Studios, and Shemaroo Entertainment, among many others, are slowly building their digital roadmaps to tap the 5 million broadband-connected homes in India.

"First with music, and now with movies, as broadband capabilities expand, hundreds of thousands of copies race across the Internet daily, clearly harming producers and legitimate retailers," laments Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO, UTV Motion Pictures.

In the US, the largest market for both Bollywood and non-Bollywood content, there are about 200,000 Indian millionaires, with some 15 per cent of Silicon Valley start-ups believed to be owned by Indians, according to a report by JPMorgan. UTV, informs Kapur, will look to target the overseas customers first with its digital offering.

Filmed entertainment executives have only to look at the music industry to see the dangers of insufficient action — take digital piracy seriously or lose billions as well as fundamental control of the value chain.

Barjatya probably read the warning signals in 2006. He released Rajshri's film Vivah online back in 2006 expanding his distribution for the 25 million Indians spread across the globe. "Physically reaching so many people is not possible and yet these are affluent NRI households with an appetite for Indian cinema. So, the Internet is the best medium to supply cinema as close to 51 per cent of NRI households have broadband access," mentions Barjatya.

Thanks to broadband penetration, digital theft has become free or costs as much as a writeable CD. Kapur acknowledges and says, "The rising number of user-generated sites like YouTube has made it easier to share videos. We do send notices to websites hosting illegal content and they respond favourably by taking off the content."

But the rising number of video-hosting sites also means that it is virtually impossible to keep track of illegal videos. Even as India's box office revenues are expected to swell up to $7.4 billion by 2010, according to PricewaterhouseCooper estimates, the downloaded content can garner more than $1.4 billion for the producers.

UTV is already rethinking its pricing strategy and release schedules for its online consumer by tightening digital distribution and security to control data leaks.

"We are working with technology companies to develop workable online distribution and rights management systems and to create easy-to-use channels at the right price," he says.

Technology can be a big help for the industry. Rising acceptance of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks among youth allows them access to one anothers' hard drives, enabling files to be freely copied or distributed from one computer to another. P2P networks do not use a central server and hence are difficult to track down, disable or prosecute.

For instance, when The Matrix Reloaded was released, pirates used a file-sharing computer programme called BitTorrent that let digital thieves download films for free within three hours of its release.

Rana Gupta, business head, Safenet, explains, "The impact of such incidents on a film's ultimate box-office and DVD performance is hard to gauge, but the longer you can prevent a scenario like this the better the return on investment for a studio."

Earlier this year, Ratatouille, the animated film from Walt Disney's Pixar, made its way online about 10 days before its release. Safenet's MediaSentry services help the studios in infringement management, early leak identification services, and various business intelligence tools to analyse data online.

"MediaSentry enables content producers to track down websites infringing copyrighted data," Gupta says. Simply put, Safenet's proprietary technology gets the digital addresses of those who download illegal files and this information is given to the Internet service providers (ISPs), which can ask the customer to stop.

Legal action has closed some sites that connect users with pirated movies. Motion Picture Association of America won its battle with TorrentSpy, a peer-to-peer site that is now closed. But Pirate Bay, a similar Sweden-based service, is still running. Pirate Bay creators say it is merely a platform and is neither uploading nor downloading proprietary content.

Back in India, Rajshri Media uses digital media rights (DRM) protection to prevent illegitimate duplication of its content, it isn't exactly foolproof. "We are focusing on bridging the demand gap and haven't really invested in protecting content from bootleggers. But we are evaluating various software techniques to make the Internet a more secure medium of distribution," adds Barjatya. It looks like a long way before Barjatya and Kapur can cast a virtual safety net over their digital assets. No one expects to eliminate piracy. But given that a film's opening weekend often accounts for 60 to 70 per cent of its earnings, every day's delay in the availability of pirated copies can make a big financial difference.

End to `Krazzy4' row; film set for release with all songs [India]

Bollywood film `Krazzy4' is set for release on Friday with all song sequences after an advertisement-jingle composer and producer Rakesh Roshan reached a "settlement" shortly after the Mumbai High Court ordered deletion of two songs on plagiarism charges.

After a victory in the Bombay High Court, composer Ram Sampath reached a settlement with producer Rakesh Roshan and gave his consent for the movie's release with all the songs, which were embroiled in the legal case.

Earlier in the day, High Court had upheld Sampath's case prima facie, restraining Roshan from releasing the movie with the songs. Sampath had claimed that his tunes had been copied for two songs--`Krazzy4' (title song) and `Break-free'--and their remixed versions.

But in the afternoon, Sampath reached a settlement with Roshan, and both the parties approached Justice D G Karnik for revocation of his earlier order.
"I won the case, and then we settled the matter "inside the court", Sampath told PTI.

"We went back to the Judge, and got the (earlier) order vacated," he added.
However, he declined to divulge the terms of the settlement. "Once we end the case formally, the settlement will be in the public domain," the composer said.

Sampath's case was that his tunes for the advertisement for Sony Ericsson cell-phones was copied by music composer and Rakesh's brother Rajesh Roshan.

Though the amount that FilmKraft will have to pay as damages to the petitioner is not known, at the end of the day, Bollywood would now perhaps agree that one will really have to be Krazzy in Bollywood to copy ever again!

The Pirates of the Arabian? In a first, Bollywood and Hollywood versus the Pirates [India]

According to the first Bollywood-Hollywood collaborative study conducted by the US-India Business Council (USIBC) and the US Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Centre, piracy and counterfeiting is depriving the Indian entertainment industry of approximately Rs 16,240 crore every year. This is almost 40 per cent of potential annual revenue, and, according to some analysts, is only a conservative estimate of the actual losses faced by the industry.

While India's entertainment and media industry is the fastest growing among BRIC nations, it is also the smallest. Many believe that stricter control on piracy could give the industry the impetus it needs to become truly global. Aside from the loss of revenue, the report also estimates that over eight lakh people lose their jobs due to piracy each year.

Though India is badly affected by piracy, it is certainly not the only country facing this problem. The US entertainment industry, it is estimated, loses about $6 billion a year in movie revenues alone. The Motion Picture Association of America's efforts notwithstanding, attempts to regulate piracy in the US have not achieved much.

In India's case, the music industry seems to have suffered the worst, with piracy resulting in a 64 per cent loss in total potential revenues, while the movie industry loses about 31 per cent. Industry officials in both countries hope to be able to use the study to pressure the government into adopting stringent anti-piracy measures and protecting intellectual property through strict legislation.

Piracy is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Every new medium is accompanied by intellectual property theft, which is almost impossible to regulate. Copyright was violated routinely in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. The VCR was viewed with panic in its initial years of release. And so it is with the internet. However, digital media complicates the matter because no physical medium is required to transfer and distribute content. The ease and reach of distribution is also unprecedented. Perhaps the best way to fight piracy is via the same channels through which it has prospered — new technology. A host of innovations, from region-encoded DVD players and coding preventing the copying of digital data, to one-time view DVDs, can be utilised to combat piracy. Another way to fight piracy could be to reduce the prices at which content is sold. Because of the low cost of the medium, high quality content can be sold on disks that cost almost as little as the pirated versions. Such innovative solutions could be the answer to piracy and counterfeiting that the Indian industry is searching for.