Art & Entertainment

The Phantom Menace

Armed with a Delhi high court order, Hollywood steps up its anti-piracy drive

Advertisement

The Phantom Menace
info_icon

IT'S the one act that Hollywood dreads. The spectre of video and cable piracy in Indiaókept alive by swarms of unscrupulous, faceless, fly-by-night operatorsóhas haunted the American studios for years, nibbling away at their bottomline with virtual impunity. According to industry estimates, it robs the studios of at least 40 per cent of their potential earnings in the country every yearóthe cumulative annual loss is believed to be a whopping $66 million. It couldn't any longer have been left to the forces of nature to sort out, so the Motion Pictures Association (mpa), which represents the Hollywood majors the world over, has swung into action in right earnest.

Advertisement

As Hollywood's anti-piracy gunslingers go in for the kill in India, they've been buoyed by a recent legal victory. In response to an mpa petition, Justice J.B. Goel of the Delhi high court issued a landmark order on July 7 barring Siti Cable, the ground distribution arm of Zee TV, and IN Cablenet, a subsidiary of the Hinduja-owned Indusind Media, from screening Hollywood films, old or new, on their networks for they do not possess the authorisation to do so. By his ex-parte injunction, Justice Goel has restrained these cable networks 'from communicating to the public either by means of cable, wire or wireless diffusion...any cinematograph film the copyright in which vests with these studios'.

Advertisement

The studios include 20th Century Fox, Columbia-Tristar Pictures, Time-Warner Entertainment, Paramount Films, Disney and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Universal. The judge has directed the police to ensure compliance of the order of injunction: an offence attracts a minimum term of six months and a fine of Rs 50,000. The punishment could go up to three years and a fine of Rs 2 lakh. The cable networks have been issued court notices and the next hearing has been fixed for August 24.

'The implications of the July 7 court order are huge,' says mpa's New Delhi-based counsel, Chander M. Lall. 'It covers all the titles, past and present, of as many as eight studios. More crucially, a host of big Hollywood releases are on the way over the next few months. This injunction will provide these films with much-needed protection from illegal exploitation.'

Among the films lined up for release: Star Wars: Episode IóThe Phantom Menace, the keenly-awaited prequel to the cult George Lucas trilogy; the zany James Bond spoof Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; the animated features Tarzan and The Prince of Egypt; the Columbia-Tristar animal saga, Mighty Joe Young, the exceedingly promising western starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Salma Hayek, Wild Wild West; the Michelle Pfeiffer heartstring-tugger, The Deep End of the Ocean and the runaway worldwide hit Entrapment, featuring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the lead, among many other major films. Already in the theatres are the Sandra Bullock-Ben Affleck starrer Forces of Nature and the Drew Barrymore-David Arquette romantic comedy Never Been Kissed.

Advertisement

The timing of the mpa action is significant. In India, the last six months of the year are extremely crucial for Hollywood. It is in July that schools and colleges reopen after the summer break in many parts of the country, and back-on-the-campus students send attendances at morning shows soaring. And that's only the beginning: the demand for out-of-Hollywood fare peaks even further during the festival seasonóDusshera, Diwali, Christmas and New Yearóand Hollywood is keen this time around to cash in on the increased flow of viewers by shutting out the cable networks. 'There is little doubt that the mpa move will have a far-reaching impact on the box-office fate of the upcoming Hollywood films,' says Lall.

Advertisement

'Once the local police authorities realise they have legal sanction to take action against offenders, things will become much easier for us,' says Aditya Shastri, managing director, 20th Century Fox, one of the studios on whose behalf Lall filed the lawsuit. The Delhi high court order has already begun to bear fruit. Only last week, there was a major raid on Siti Cable in Mumbai. 'Such action,' says Shastri, 'will force the big multi-systems operators to put pressure on their franchisees to stay off films they don't have rights to.'

All these years, he points out, the Hollywood studios had confined themselves to initiating criminal proceedings against violators of copyright laws. It did not always work. But now that mpa is armed with an injunction, any offence will amount to contempt of court and will require the offender, no matter where he is based in India, to travel all the way to Delhi to appear before the court that has issued the order in the first place. 'If we take action against even a couple of guys, it will act as an effective deterrent for the others,' feels Lall.

Advertisement

While officials of the cable networks named in the high court injunction are reluctant to talk because the matter is subjudice, one senior functionary insists the big cable TV players have no hand in the piracy racket. 'As a matter of policy, we never air any software that's not legally ours. If occasional violations do occur, they do so at the end of the franchisees without our knowledge, let alone support,' he argues. Face-saving device, says Lall: 'Can individual cable operators bear the cost of producing unauthorised vcds? The bigger players have to be directly involved for cable piracy to be possible.'

Hollywood films are often shown on cable networks in this country even before they are released in theatres. These films reach India a few months after their international release, which allows racketeers to acquire camcorder prints smuggled in from abroad and then sold to the cable operators in India. 'Everybody loses out in the bargainóthe government, the producers, the exhibitors and, most importantly, all those who are employed by the industry,' says Shastri. 'Even if one per cent of the 60-odd lakh Indians who have access to cable TV are weaned away from the theatres, it adds up to a huge loss, something the industry can ill-afford,' he explains.

Advertisement

Hollywood's growing concern at the debilitating impact of cable piracy in India is a sure indication of the increasing importance of the market here, which still is, one must remember, only one-tenth that of the market for Hollywood films in New Zealand. But as Lall points out, the size of the Indian audience for Hollywood films is growing steadily. In '94, the hugely successful Jurassic Park, which was dubbed in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu by Paramount Films, grossed Rs 22 crore in India. Last year, a single English-language version of Titanic topped the Rs 60-crore mark, outstripping the biggest Hindi hit of '98, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Advertisement

Enthused by the unprecedented success of the James Cameron-directed film, 20th century Fox has now dubbed Titanic in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu and is planning to release these versions all over India in August. Besides, even lesser films like Anaconda (Rs 18 crore), for which India ranked fifth among the highest-grossing countries, and Godzilla, which grossed Rs 26 crore from the Indian market, making it the second highest after Japan in Asia and 11th worldwide.

So as the Hollywood picture gets bigger and brighter in Indiaóthe show will be at its liveliest when Tarzan swings into rhythm in India in October and fights a box-office battle with The Phantom Menaceóit is only logical that the American studios should talk toughóand act even tougheróin the war to protect its turf from the depredations of cable TV pirates in the Wild Wild East.

Advertisement

Tags

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement