Warner Bros says, “Blame Canada!”
by Ian Harding
As I'm sure many of you are aware, Warner Bros. Pictures has cancelled all premier screenings of upcoming films in Canada, claiming that Canada is a big player in the game of film piracy. Warner Bros. Pictures is the first studio to take action against Canada to fight movie piracy.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
"Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up."... said Darcy Antonellis, senior vp worldwide anti-piracy operations at Warner Bros. Entertainment.
From an article on CTV Canada:
"In the last three years we've created the technology that puts a watermark on every movie print that's sent out of Hollywood," Douglas Frith, of the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, told CTV's Mike Duffy Live."So when you find a pirated version anywhere on the Internet, from that watermark we can determine where it was camcorded. And for 20 to 25 per cent of the cases worldwide in 2005, it was camcorded in Canada. That number, compared to the size of our population, is astronomical."
The article also states that there are people who get paid between $5,000 and $7,000 for a good copy of a film before it's release. Damn.