PIRATES OF THE CAMCORDER BEING ARRESTED AT `M:I III'.

Byline: GREG HERNANDEZ Staff Writer

``Mission: Impossible III'' may not have been as hot a ticket as expected, but the action spy flick starring Tom Cruise was an attraction for movie pirates, four of whom were arrested in theaters over the weekend including the Arclight in Hollywood.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Monday that the arrests in Hollywood, Evansville, Ill., and Taipei, Taiwan, were the result of theater employees being better trained to identify and report suspicious behavior.

At the Arclight, Los Angeles Police Department officers arrested a 49- year-old woman, and employees and patrons allegedly witnessed her attempting to record ``M:I III'' with a handheld camcorder.

``Theater employee training programs clearly paid off,'' said John Malcom, the MPAA's executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy.

At this year's ShoWest Convention in Las Vegas, a new online training program called FightFilmTheft.org was launched by the major exhibition and distribution trade groups in the U.S. and Canada. After employees complete an online tutorial and quiz, they will be eligible for a $300 quarterly drawing just for being trained.

In the U.S., theater employees are already eligible for a $500 reward for identifying and preventing movie theft in theaters through a joint program called Take Action! That program, launched by the MPAA and the National Association of Theater Owners in 2004, has resulted in 30 employees receiving awards and 69 camcording incidents being stopped.

Industry leaders said more than 90 percent of newly released films that are stolen originate from camcorders that were snuck into a theater. The recordings are then sold to labs that produce illegal DVDs to be sold on the street or they are uploaded onto the Internet for illegal downloading.

``Within hours of the illegal camcording of a film from a theater screen, countless digital copies are available for download via Internet and hard copies are being burned onto DVDs for resale costing the film industry worldwide billions of dollars every year,'' said Mike Ellis, senior vice president and Asia-Pacific regional director for the Motion Picture Association.

According to a study released by the MPAA last week, major movie studios lost an estimated $6.1 billion in 2005 because of Internet piracy, bootlegging and illegal copying.

The losses are far bigger than any previous annual estimates and showed that Internet piracy, which accounted for $2.3 billion of the losses, is now nearly matching the losses for street sales of bootlegged copies, which totaled $2.4 billion. The remaining $1.4 billion was lost to the illegal copying of films.

The study showed that the bulk of the losses were from international piracy, which accounted for $4.8 billion. About half of that total was from European countries. The remaining $1.3 billion in losses occurred in the U.S., which is higher than any individual country.

greg.hernandez(at)dailynews.com

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