Warner Bros. Blames Canada for Piracy

Wed., May. 9, 2007 3:05 PM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Forget Voldemort. Harry Potter has a more pressing enemy: Canada.

Two months ahead of the highly anticipated release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros. has decided to nix all promotional screenings of the sorcerer sequel and other would-be summer hits, including Ocean's Thirteen, Nancy Drew and the Catherine Zeta-Jones-Aaron Eckhart romantic vehicle No Reservation.

The reason?

Warners executives are blaming Canada for rampant movie piracy and hope the cancellation forces Canada's parliament to strengthen anti-piracy laws and crack down on illegal recording. According to studio estimates, in the last 18 months, 70 percent of bootlegged Warner Bros. movies were shot in Canadian theaters.

"It's less of a ban than a strategy to reduce our risk and it will be in effect for all Warner Bros. and Warner Independent films until such time as the risk is reevaluated," a studio spokesman told E! Online. "It's a business move actually."

The new policy covers sneak peeks for average moviegoers, but does not affect advanced screenings for journalists. The films will still open as scheduled in Canadian theaters.

Warner Bros. decided on the new "strategy" because Canadian law permits a person to videotape a movie in a theater for home use and only criminalizes such action if the recording is proven to have been used for commercial gain.

"What the policy will do is cut down on the risks when you have open screenings," said the studio rep. "This tends to be big business for a lot of people and anybody doing this professionally knows that all they have to say is 'I'm going to take it home and watch it.

"We've put in a lot of time to guard against camcordering, but without a law, the most we can do is ask someone to leave."

Warner Bros. and other studios have, along with the Motion Picture Association of America, been lobbying Canadian officials for the several years to ban camcorders in theaters.

Without such action, the studios claim, their films are quickly disseminated online and can be duped for sale on the black market around the world.

The distributors now employ technology that enables them to trace the countries (and sometimes the theaters) where such bootlegs originated via a special digital watermark imprinted on the reel itself.

According to the MPAA, Canada now ranks as a problem country because roughly one in five pirated movies are recorded there. Because of the country's lax recording laws and state-of-the-art movie houses, the illegal dupes often feature pristine sound and high-quality images.

Senators Diane Feinstein (Democrat, California) and John Cornyn (Republican, Texas) have even written to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper urging his government to act more aggressively against film pirates.

Warners' promotional screening ban goes into effect June 7 with the release of Ocean's Thirteen and will remain in place until the studio feels there are stronger laws on the books.

At the same time, Warner Bros. is also attempting a proactive approach. The distributor reached a deal with BitTorrent last year to make several catalogue movies and TV shows available for legal download.

BitTorrent, of course, is the company whose innovative file-sharing software pirates have used to quickly and efficiently download movies and music. Hoping to avoid the fate of Napster, BitTorrent has since reached agreements with the MPAA to try and clamp down on pirated material available in its search engine.