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Will New Line Cinema be forced to distribute LOTR movies on the Net? - Lord of the Rings news - J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

August 07, 2000 at 15:49:06

Peter Jackson's first Middle-earth movie, 'The Fellowship of the Ring', is scheduled for world-wide release on December 14, 2001. Film industry executives are alarmed that by that time, up to 1,000,000 people per day may be able to download newly released movies from the Internet.

Already, according to a Chicago Tribune/Reuters report on the recent "Herring on Hollywood" conference, more than 350,000 people per day are downloading illegal copies of recent movies through a loose network of FTP and IRC sites. FTP locations are broadcast on the IRC channels and people who are in the know go and retrieve the movies.

The broad implications for the film industry are dire. The process by which the movies are pirated is very simple. Usually, the article says, a post-production video is taken and recorded directly to the pirate's hard drive. Then it is compressed and uploaded. Alternative methods are also being employed.

The recent revelation of video footage thefts from Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" production in New Zealand underscores just how vulnerable new movie productions are to piracy. The thieves merely planned to sell the stolen video footage, but they could also have simply uploaded it to the Internet and let many secrets out of the bag.

The film industry is having to come to grips with the fact that piracy is on the rise and that simply filing a lawsuit, as the music industry attempted to do against Napster.Com, may only backfire and encourage widespread sympathy for the pirates. Because of the lawsuit and accompanying publicity, Napster is now more popular than ever, as well as rival Gnutella, a freely distributed program which allows users to create ad hoc networks over the Internet for the purpose of exchanging files.

Gnutella, or a derivative of the program, may become a prime distribution channel for illegal movies in the future. What's worse, some content creators of copyrighted works actually support or tolerate Napster and similar services. Copyrights don't benefit everyone, although the film and television industries (at least in the United States) do now provide residuals in many if not all contracts for actors and writers.

If the number of people actively downloading (and provding for download) illegal copies of newly minted movies by the end of 2001 isn't enough to force New Line Cinema and other film distributors to take action, by the end of 2002 they may be distributing films on the Internet themselves. The theater owners of the world may become alarmed by the prospect of major film distributors turning to the Internet, but the options presently on the table are few.

So, either way, it's almost certain that "The Lord of the Rings" will eventually appear on a PC (or Mac) near you, whether New Line wants it that way or not. The only questions are when will this happen, who will offer the movies to you, how much will they cost you to download and view, and will that affect box office sales in future years?