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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated June 13, 2007 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
Hollywood has stepped up its fight against movie piracy in Asia with the release of an anti-piracy trailer in Singapore. The 30-second trailer shows a thief, swinging in from a helicopter and dodging lasers, trying to steal a DVD. He is later caught. More than 30 cases of pirated movies, filmed with handheld video cameras in theaters, have been traced to the Asia-Pacific region in the past two years, said Fritz Attaway of the Motion Picture Association “As we tackle this problem in our cinemas across North America and in Europe, we anticipate that even more will come from the Asia-Pacific region,” Attaway told reporters.
Every day, people buy or rent thousands of DVDs. These unsuspecting customers take these DVDs home and watch them with their families. They have no idea those very discs may contain Easter eggs -- another name for inside jokes, tributes, cameos and all sorts of other hidden things that have very little to do with the actual movie. According to www.eeggs.com, an Easter egg is defined as any hidden, entertaining thing someone hides in their creation only for their own personal reasons. It can be anything, including a hidden list of developers, jokes, tributes, outtakes, blooper reels or pictures of family members. An employee at a movie-rental business was browsing the chapter-selection screens of “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” when something popped up suddenly. “I saw a special logo pop up to the side,” he said. “I clicked that, and it started playing a special video.” The eggs are usually extra information for fans of the movie, akin to special features of a DVD.
At least 800,000 DVDs (among them games) worth an estimated £2 million have been seized and five people arrested at a raid on a West Midlands premises in what is the largest haul ever in the UK. Although the majority of the 800,000 discs, with an estimated street value of over £2 million, were pirated DVD films, a significant quantity of as yet unspecified games and counterfeit music CDs were also seized. Nothing beats a portable DVD player for a long trip — except perhaps one with two screens. Designed for those with more than one child, the Disney Dual Screen Mobile DVD Player can simultaneously display a movie or video game on two 7-inch screens. The screens are tethered by a single seven-foot audio-video and power cord, long enough to have one screen in the front seat attached to the beverage holder, and the second on a headrest for viewers in the far back. Each screen has an independent volume control and a headphone jack. Just one has the video controls and actually plays the DVD, though there is also a remote control. The screens are easy to move around the car, thanks to clever holding straps designed to stretch around the back of a seat, just in case one child needs some space. As anyone who travels with children knows, options are good
Russia's DVD pirates will face up to six years in prison after President Vladimir Putin threw his weight behind the country's renewed campaign to tackle rampant piracy. Putin signed off on tougher measures to combat piracy when he approved amendments to Russia's criminal code that add a year to the maximum sentences that producers of pirated movies, music and other intellectual property would face and double maximum fines to $20,000. Amnesties that have often allowed known pirates to slip through the net will no longer apply, and the statute of limitations for chasing down pirate producers is increased to 10 years under the amendments to Article 146 of the Russian criminal code. The measures -- which make piracy offenses a more serious crime under Russian law -- are a signal that the Kremlin is getting tough on copyright crime and should send a wave of fear through pirates who have become used to big profits and lax laws. Duncan News Leader [Canada]: DVD Commentaries “As a film fan and as a student studying movies, I’ve always found DVDs really fascinating — I mean the good ones — because you could really learn a lot from them about making movies and what happened behind the scenes,” says writer/director Ryan Fleck on the commentary track of the Half Nelson DVD. Director Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men doesn’t have a commentary track but the single-disc DVD more than compensates with how’d-they-do-that featurettes on its innovative action sequences and a thought-provoking documentary on the underlying philosophical issues which play into the film’s grim vision of a not too distant future in which the world is gripped by a global infertility crisis.
Anti
piracy raids in Sao Paulo recently yielded 200 CD burners and over
30,000 pirated CDs and DVDs with a street value of more than $100,000.
Industry observers said the law should spark a renewed crackdown on piracy through new police campaigns to halt sales of discs at outdoor markets and street-corner kiosks, the main place of business for bootlegged DVDs in Russia. The report said the new law allows Russian leaders to point to the country's tougher stance against piracy ahead of its accession to the World Trade Organization. Russia's record in thwarting piracy has been a major stumbling blocks to its membership. end
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