By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Hulk smash: next gen P2P blockers emerge
A long piece at the FT looks at new strategies for preventing digital piracy and peer-to-peer sharing. Writes Joshua Chaffin of the notorious bootlegging of The Hulk: “As the premiere approached, Universal executives were brimming with optimism. The final print was in the can, and they had the weekend of June 20 all to themselves for an opening on more than 3,600 screens… But nobody had counted on Kerry Gonzalez, then a 24-year-old insurance adjuster and film buff from Hamilton Township, New Jersey. Through a friend who worked at an advertising agency in Manhattan that was creating a campaign… Gonzalez received an advance copy… [T]wo weeks before [the] premiere, he posted the film to a file-sharing service in the Netherlands, making it available to anyone with a computer and a broadband connection who wanted to download it from the internet. “We freaked out,” a former Universal executive said… [B]ased on estimates of lost ticket sales and other revenues compiled by one consultancy, Deloitte & Touche, the hacker may have cost Universal between $60m and $90m… Seeing Jonathan Friend in the conference room of a midtown Manhattan law firm, you might easily imagine that he is one of the partners’ school-age children who has strayed into the wrong office… Yet on a recent afternoon in one such conference room, Friend was the star attraction… With media executives and entertainment lawyers gathered around him, he was showing off the culmination of six years’ toil: a new computer program designed to help the media industry in its fight against piracy.” [The cogent overview follows at the link.]