BB FANS

Mon 16 August, 2004 08:04

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Movie studio DreamWorks, which is preparing to spin off its animation unit in an initial public offering, is scrambling to prevent the proliferation of pristine bootleg copies of its hit cartoon "Shrek 2," Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety says.

The official DVD will not reach stores until November 5, but pirated versions have recently turned up in auctions on eBay and on several British online auction sites, Daily Variety said on Monday. They were quickly removed, apparently in response to studio requests, the paper added.

While most bootlegs sold on the Web are derived from crudely produced tapes captured surreptitiously in theaters by camcorders, the "Shrek 2" offerings appear to have been struck from a clean, studio copy of the film pilfered during post-production or replication, Daily Variety said.

A spokeswoman for DreamWorks' DVD replicator Technicolor Home Entertainment said the studio has asked it to conduct a forensic analysis of "Shrek 2" bootlegs to try to determine their source.

"Shrek 2" has earned $435 million (236 million pounds) at the North American box office, easily ranking as the biggest film of the year. DreamWorks, founded a decade ago by director Steven Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, announced last month it plans to raise $650 million by spinning off its DreamWorks Animation unit.

I don't get why people do the whole pirate copy thing, what's the point?

I saw Shrek 2 in the cinema - fantastic!

Its cheaper?

Yes but illegal, apparently the quality is crap quite a lot of the time and the cinema doesn't cost that much.

Depends on where you get it from, and how long you can wait, often you can get perfectly good quality from copies of the DVDs being manufactured, but the quality of the stuff that comes out before or just after a movie is released I believe is usually shite.

Can't stand the cinema myself, find it hard to actually get into the film, much nicer at home on a comfy sofa

I watched a copy, my friend gets them all the time, was annoying though cos it was from an american cinema + u could hear them speaking at the start!!

I think they r crap better going to cinema.

i hate pirate dvds. i think it's immoral.
i have nothing against pirate music though, music should definitely be free to download.

if anyone wants my reasoning behind this then just ask. dont want to write a massive paragraph about my double standards if noone cares!

You can't confuse someone with your downright messed up logic and then not explain!

p.s. elaborate, please

dammit.

ok.

free films arent good for the film industry, whereas free music is good for the music industry.

for example, if i was given the 'Day after tomorrow' on pirate dvd, i wouldnt bother buying the real copy as my pirate copy is fine.

wheras if i download a song by a band that arent very famous but i've heard people raving about and i like them, i will probably go out and buy a CD. i used to do this all the time! i got into lots of bands this way (nofx, smashing pumpkins, nin, the ataris, fenix tx) and i liked bowling for soup and new found glory before they were famous

i still think two or three years ago, when there were lots of free download services, were a great time for music. but i dont listen to music much anymore cos i cant get into new bands because i refuse to part with £13 for something i might not like.

i know i could download the album, but kazaa and napster usually remotely queued a lot of files, and therefor the album had to be bought if the songs were to be heard.

whereas films. if i see a trailer for a film i want to see, i'll pay a fiver to get in at the cinema. if it's crap, their loss. if it's good, i'll go and buy it. whereas if i get a pirate dvd from some bloke down the pub then i wont go and buy it, as that would be foolish.

i hope that makes sense

Indeed it does, thats exactly what I do!

I use soulseek right now and I've heard plenty of new music that I might have bought had I not realised it was shite... so far I've only 'discovered' a few new bands that I now like, and they weren't particularly obscure... but I get your meaning!

i downloaded soulseek but i havent bothered figuring out how to work it yet

At least it isn't as bad as me, I have had a string of filesharing apps that I've downloaded only to end up using them to chat...

i've never chatted on one of those things... dunno why!
i do enjoy chatting to random internet people though.