I filed this story for Wired News today:
Every 10 feet or so in Santee Alley, there's someone standing behind a cardboard box full of discs. Each mumbles the same mantra: "DVD, DVD, DVD, DVD, Estar Guars."
They're DVD bootleggers, and they're the target of a new system of surveillance cameras recently installed by the Los Angeles Police Department with money from the Motion Picture Association of America.The MPAA, which represents major movie studios, contributed $186,000 toward the cost of the cameras and a software monitoring system that detects human movement. The devices beam video to the LAPD's Central Area station, where the software alerts officers to activity. If there's rampant selling of bootleg DVDs, undercover police are dispatched to the site.
At a press conference announcing the project last Tuesday, LAPD chief William Bratton reported that four cameras are already operating, and there are plans to install six more in coming weeks throughout the area."These cameras … will help (the LAPD) to lift a rock and shine a light on rampant counterfeiting of DVDs, which used to take place in the dark shadows," MPAA worldwide anti-piracy chief John Malcolm told Variety last week.
At the press conference, Bratton said news of the system was spreading quickly among bootleggers, and that a chilling effect on sales had already begun. Santee Alley was reportedly selected because the area is frequented by naive tourists who are easy targets for pirates, Bratton said. The MPAA claims DVD piracy costs Hollywood billions of dollars each year in lost revenue.
But a visit to Santee Alley suggests that the trade in bootleg DVDs is no more of a threat to the movie industry's theatrical sales or DVD revenue than the $20 "PREADA" handbags or $9 "Ray-buns" sunglasses are to their high-priced, authentic cousins on Rodeo Drive. With the new MPAA/LAPD surveillance system, another small chunk of everyday privacy has been jettisoned in the name of protecting movie industry profits.
The LAPD refuses to say where the cameras are installed. When asked, officer Grace Brady said the department will not disclose their whereabouts. So I visited the area on foot to try to find the cameras.
Link to Wired News story.
A postscript: While the LAPD would not confim the exact locations of the devices, when I told an LAPD officer yesterday where we'd found two of the surveillance cams, and I described the devices to her, she said — "Yes, those sound like ours, and we placed them near vantage points for both sides of the alley."
Sean Bonner and Jeff Koga joined me for the quest to find the cams — they were the ones who actually spotted 'em! Both Sean and Jeff took photos. Jeff shot the detail shot of the camera at top (Link to full-size) and the long shot of the area surveilled by that camera, at left (Link to full-size). More pics from Jeff here.
More photos here on Wired News.
More images of the wacky knockoff activity in Santee Alley: Link.
Technical note about the two pirated DVDs I bought in Santee Alley: I brought them to Felix Mack, a friend in Hollywood who works as a freelance DVD editor for entertainment companies. Here was his spec analysis: "The maximum bitrate on DVDs is about 10.8 megabits per second. These DVD-Rs are encoded around 1 or 2 MBPS. Legit movies you'd buy in a store average around 6-8 MBPS, and television show DVDS might be around 4-5 MBPS — and they'd be on DVD-9s, not DVD-Rs. DVD-Rs burned single layer can fit up to 4.7 gigs of content, but usually when you buy movies in a store, they'd be double layer, and they'd hold about twice that amount of data."
My highly compressed, blurry, timecoded bootleg of Star Wars: ROTS occupies only 1.4 gigs of space. The quality was unwatchably crappy. Tell me again that this disc is destroying Hollywood?
Update: Sean Bonner has blogged more photos and a first-person account. He whipped up some great topo maps with Google that show the precise location of the cams we found. Link.
Some readers asked for higher-res images of box art from the two DVDs I bought. I've uploaded scans of the bootlegged Fantastic Four (all sizes here), which wasn't, and Star Wars: ROTS (all sizes here), to my flickr photostream. It's hard to read the packaging but if you look closely at one of the larger sizes you can see that this was the special edition of Star Wars directed by Jerry Bruckheimer, starring Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, and Steve Buscemi.
