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Marc Brandon works in a far corner of the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, Calif., not far from where the old western back lot used to be. His office is plain and neat, and there was a time when his job was too--back when, as director of antipiracy Internet operations, his chief responsibility was reminding online T-shirt companies that the studio owns Bugs Bunny. Today, Brandon, 30, in jeans and an oversize T shirt, says the pirates dictate his daily schedule. In 2002 some 41 million illegal copies of movies were seized by law-enforcement authorities around...
...finished being shot. Every work print of the movie was encoded with a hidden marker so that it could be identified if it was leaked. Even the scripts had codes stamped across every page, each corresponding to the owner's name. Before sending Samurai to dubbing houses, Warner Bros. rendered the copies less piratable by going through every scene and editing out characters not relevant to the particular dubbing job--an exercise that took about three days per cassette. The studio did send out "screener" copies to Oscar voters--a high-risk move--but far fewer than normal...
...they do not even like to dignify it with the word. "It's a word that has a swashbuckling, cool kind of feel, and that's not what we're talking about. This isn't Johnny Depp on the front of a boat," says Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Bros. "It's theft. It's shoplifting. It's grand larceny...
...just one day after its release in theaters. In this day and age, that is a victory--which reflects how badly the studios are losing the war. That first pirate of Samurai was from a camcorder copy made in a U.S. theater on the day the movie premiered. Warner Bros. has identified the theater using tracking codes hidden in the film but declined to reveal the information, citing ongoing legal investigations. After years of resisting the hard line taken by the music industry, the studio recently decided to take off the gloves and pursue civil litigation against pirates. The M.P.A.A...
...usually out in 48 hours. On Dec. 13, a TIME reporter bought Samurai from a stall along Taweewong Road in Phuket, Thailand. "We've had Last Samurai for three days already," said vendor Nook (not his real name). At his booth, just 50 yards from an official Warner Bros. store, Samurai was available with Thai, Chinese or Bahasa Indonesia subtitles. Business has improved, Nook says, since police stopped shaking him down for a monthly $60 payoff. Now he pays just $150 a year for an official ID card. Piracy has become so normalized that it has its own bureaucracy...