Film, TV firms unite over copyright.

They want repro standard for future video discs

L.A. COUNTY - Film producers and distributors won an important victory March 29, when their lead trade association came to an agreement with consumer electronics manufacturers that should help protect film copyrights in the digital age.

The Motion Picture Association of America and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association have been wrangling for about two years over reproduction standards for a digital video recording industry that still does not exist.

However, a new generation of home devices capable of playing and recording movies in digital format is on the horizon, and they pose a serious threat to the motion picture industry.

Players for digital video discs, better known as DVDs, will connect to television sets much like current video cassette recorders, but they will play movies stored on software the size and shape of a modem audio compact disc or CD-ROM.

Although they are not expected to hit the American market until late 1997, and the first generation of devices will be capable only of playing movies and not recording them, eventually they will become ideal tools for software pirates.

Pirates may prosper

Machines capable of recording films digitally will also be able to make unlimited copies with little or no drop-off in visual or audio quality. With today's analog VCRs, reproduction quality decreases with each successive copy made.

Thus, with the onset of DVD recorders - or, for that matter, any other not-yet-developed new devices capable of making digital recordings - pirates will have the power to record a movie directly from a television broadcast and then make and sell numerous high-quality copies.

The March 29 agreement between the MPAA and CEMA means the two groups will now attempt to convince Congress to draft and pass a new chapter to the U.S. Copyright Act that will apply to digital recording.

The law, if passed, would require makers of DVDs and other digital recorders sold in the U.S. to build machines capable of reading a code that would be transmitted in the signal on movies played over TV sets.

Consumers of the future would be allowed to make unlimited copies of anything shown over broadcast or pay cable TV, just as they are now.

Multiple copies nixed

However, the devices would prevent them from making more than one copy of a film delivered over subscription or pay cable TV, and would prevent any copies at all made from pay-per-view or video-on-demand TV. The machines would also make it impossible to make copies of pre-recorded video discs.

But "any pirate that wanted to get through (the copy protection technology) could do it," said Bennett Kurtze, president of Toluca Lake-based digital film distributor Digital Disc Entertainment. "A bandit's a bandit."

The amendment to the Copyright Act proposed by CEMA and the MPAA provides for penalties of up to $7.5 million per violation if illegal copies were made for financial gain. A consumer who circumvents the technology strictly for personal use could be penalized with a fine of no more than $25.