Piracy, Pickets and Peter Bart

Unrest on the studio, union and trade fronts

By Nikki Finke

Over the past week, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the fourth in the Marvel/20th Century Fox franchise, was illegally pirated onto the Web and downloaded millions of times from file-sharing Web sites. "It's been like Whac-A-Mole," a studio exec tells me. "Every time we get it removed from one site, it pops up on another."

Fox is describing it as one of the worst piracy scandals it can recall, since it involves a major studio and a major summer blockbuster. The studio is understandably in a panic. With the film opening on May 1, if those viewers don't go to a theater to see it, this leak could cause incalculable damage to the box office. Moviegoers may still head for theaters, because the stolen work print is an incomplete early version missing many of its special effects, edited scenes and finished sound and music.

Now the FBI is investigating the crime. Fox forensically marks its content so it can identify sources that make it available or download it. The studio promises that the source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted "to the fullest extent of the law." Indeed, in the past, the courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts. One postproduction house in Australia was initially suspected, and a facility in Dallas was raided, but so far no arrests have been made.

Coincidentally, this came just days before U.S. Congressman Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, held a field hearing in Van Nuys on April 6 to assess the financial impact of global intellectual-property piracy. On April 30, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is scheduled to release its annual report on intellectual-property policies and practices in other countries. Last year's report placed nine major offenders on the USTR's Priority Watch List, including China, Russia, Thailand and Argentina. A RAND study released earlier this month alleges that organized crime is increasingly active in film piracy. Just one problem — that study was funded by the MPAA, the trade association for the Hollywood studios.

Meanwhile, the Web piracy has created a lot of buzz around the pic, both positive and negative. The Internet is filled with fanboy comments about whether Wolverine is any good.

One of those who reviewed the purloined print was Fox News entertainment gossip columnist Roger Friedman. Now he's out of a job. The longtime "Fox 411" freelancer wrote on April 3 what his bosses felt was a blatant promotion of piracy, posting about finding "the whole Top 10 [of movies now in theaters], plus TV shows, commercials, videos, everything, all streaming away. It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer. I could have downloaded all of it, but really, who has the time or the room? Later tonight I may finally catch up with Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man. It's so much easier than going out in the rain!"

I broke the story about News Corp.'s response, which was swift and severe. First, Roger Ailes, who oversees Fox News, deleted the offending post after he was contacted by 20th Century Fox. Then Ailes fired Friedman as a freelance Fox News entertainment writer. "He promoted piracy. He basically suggested that viewing a stolen film is okay, which is absolutely intolerable. So we fired him," a source told me Saturday. "Fox News acted promptly on all fronts."

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-04-09/news/piracy-pickets-and-peter-bart?src=newsletter