By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, June 19, 2002; Page H01
Ranger is burrowing through the public parts of your computer, sniffing around, turning over bits of data, trying to find out if you've stolen a movie over the Internet.
Ranger is scouring the globe -- Web sites, chat rooms, newsgroups and peer-to-peer file-sharing sites -- spanning 60 countries, searching in English, Chinese and Korean. Ranger's work is helping to bust illegal movie sites in Iran, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ranger is 24-7. Ranger is relentless.
Ranger is a piece of software that acts like an Internet search engine. It is the latest, most far-reaching weapon in the movie industry's constant and escalating battle against movie piracy.
Hollywood watched in horror as Napster corroded the music industry -- last year, worldwide revenue from CD sales dropped 7 percent as billions of songs were legally and illegally downloaded from the Internet. The movie studios -- led by their lobbying group, the Motion Picture Association of America -- is determined not to let that happen to them.
"We are trying to stem the tide as best as we can," said Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA. "I worry about the future."
Some say the studios are unfairly targeting them.
Internetmovies.com is suing the MPAA because Ranger tagged the Web site as a movie pirate last year, which prompted the company's Internet provider to cut off access. The owner of the Web site is positioning his suit as a David-vs.-Goliath struggle.
"They should be liable for their mistakes," said Michael Rossi, webmaster of Hawaii-based Internetmovies.com. "You can't just go around shutting people's businesses down."
>From Goliath's point of view, the problem is simple: It is criminally
and morally wrong, and economically damaging, for pirates to steal films
and illegally copy and distribute them. It is the MPAA's duty to stop
the pirates, the group believes.
The origin of movies circulating on the Internet varies. Some are advance copies of blockbusters, apparently stolen from studios or otherwise leaked to the public before they are shown in theaters. The copies are converted into digital files and put on the Internet, or resold in the form of illegal DVDs and videocassettes.
In other instances, people armed with video recorders will make their way into an early screening of a movie, say "Spider-Man." They will record the movie and turn it into a digital file. The quality is subpar, but that's not the point: The hunger that drives Internet movie piracy is the need to see a movie before everyone else does. "Spider-Man" and "Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones," for instance, appeared on the Internet within hours of their theatrical release.
Once a movie has been be unleashed on the Internet, it spreads like a virus via peer-to-peer file-sharing services. The downside: Unlike songs, which take only seconds or minutes to download, movies can take hours -- even days -- to transfer because the files must be large to accommodate moving color images as well as sound.
But Valenti and those in the movie industry know that the time barrier is becoming less of an issue as more people gain access to high-speed Internet connections. Now, consumers with broadband can download a feature-length film in about six hours. Within 18 months, Valenti fears, advances in technology will significantly reduce that time.
Even now, 400,000 to 600,000 movies are illegally downloaded worldwide each day, Valenti said, citing statistics from Viant, a technology consultant. "Remember, at the height of Napster, 3 billion songs a month were coming down," he said.
To keep that from happening, the movie industry turned two years ago to San Diego's Ranger Online Inc., a 50-person company that developed the Ranger software.
Ranger is the key element of the MPAA's overall anti-piracy effort, based in Encino, Calif., which takes a "substantial and growing amount of MPAA resources," said MPAA spokesman Richard Taylor, declining to quote figures. The MPAA recently expanded its pirate hunt to include China and South Korea; China because of the sheer population and South Korea because it has the largest penetration of high-speed Internet access of any Asian nation. The MPAA monitors piracy out of offices in Brussels, Hong Kong, Toronto and Mexico City.
The movie studios provide Ranger Online with a constantly updated list of 100 to 150 movie titles, typically those about to be released or just released. In other words, the ones that the industry stands the most to lose from if they're stolen.
If the movie is "It's a Wonderful Life" and "it's on 100,000 times a day in syndication," Valenti said, "we're not too worried about that."
Ranger takes the titles and, "like a bloodhound," Valenti said, sets out on the Internet, looking for those films on Web sites, in chat rooms, on peer-to-peer sites. It is an automated software, speeding across the Internet. When it finds a movie title, it marks the location, decides whether the movie is being used in a way that infringes on its copyright, then moves on. Jeremy Rasmussen, Ranger Online's chief technology executive and founder, won't disclose exactly how his software manages this, except to say: "The challenge is 'How do you cover a lot of area without having to visit every page?' That's part of the intelligent way we scan."
Ranger Online provides the data to the MPAA and prepares cease-and-desist letters. The MPAA reviews the data and decides which letters to send. Last year, the group sent 54,000 letters; this year, it is on pace to send 80,000 to 100,000. Typically, the letters are sent to the Internet service provider hosting a site or user that the MPAA has deemed to possess ill-gotten films. The ISPs take down the offending site 85 to 90 percent of the time, Valenti said. Ranger then checks back periodically on the offending site to make sure it hasn't begun pirating again.
If the letters don't work, then the MPAA may contact local authorities, asking them to seize computer servers storing the pirated films. MPAA action recently led to a server seizure in the Netherlands.
Ranger sells itself to the MPAA and other clients based on its global scope, speed and thorough analysis. But a recent suit questions Ranger's precision.
In April of last year, Internetmovies.com's Rossi got an e-mail from the MPAA and its 14 big studios accusing his site of illegally posting copyrighted material: "We have notified your ISP of the unlawful nature of this web site and have asked for its immediate removal," the e-mail read. The MPAA followed up with a certified letter and a phone call to the ISP. Rossi said his ISP dropped him. He was down for about three days, searching for a new provider.
>From New Zealand, where he is attending a film festival, Rossi said he
did nothing wrong. All he did, he said, was post links to film trailers
already distributed by the studios. He said he never distributed
copyrighted material. Rossi filed suit against the MPAA on April 25 of
this year, seeking minimal damages.
"I'm not suing for millions of dollars or anything," he said. "It's just the principle of their behavior."
The MPAA stands by its actions, saying Rossi was "at the time, offering for distribution for members [of his Web site] copyrighted films," said Mark Litvack, the MPAA's director of worldwide legal affairs for anti-piracy.
But Rossi said he was unfairly targeted by the automated Ranger, which misinterpreted his site's function. Ranger's Rasmussen said the software's information is analyzed and interpreted by employees, who also scan the Internet themselves.
Rossi is unimpressed. "How can [the movie business] be a billion-dollar industry and be so ignorant?" he asked.