26th July 2006, Berlin.  If you see a person in a shopping precinct or at the station sometime in the first weeks of August, who has tried to blend in with his surroundings with the aid of body paint, you will likely be right in the middle of the new promotion tour for the information campaign “Copyright thieves are Criminals”. 
The campaign’s message is “Copyright thieves can not hide”, a message which is reinforced by stickers placed next to the models.  Uniformed promoters are positioned in the near vicinity to distribute prize-draw flyers, provide information and answer questions on all aspects of film piracy. 

Click here to watch the spot
With the new promotion tour, it is important for us to become directly involved in the public debate once more and to make it clear – in a humorous way – that pirates can not rely on the alleged anonymity afforded by the internet.” stated Jan Oesterlin, Managing Director of the Zukunft Kino Marketing GmbH who initiated the campaign “Copyright thieves are Criminals”.  “Nowadays there are many different ways to trace pirates online.” 

The promotion tour is intended to utilise the target audience specific orientation of its activities.  Since as early as the end of 2005, “viral ads” have been providing information on the dangers of piracy using the motto “Copyright thieves can not hide”, exclusively on the internet.  The strategy behind this: to reach the target audience more directly, to be more intensively and visibly active at the crime scene – the internet – whilst not neglecting to thank the public where films are consumed legally.

From 26th July, the campaign’s newest spot, referring viewers to the risks associated with piracy, will appear on the internet, on television and later also in cinemas.  The story: a young man meets a woman in a bar and during their short conversation experiences a relationship in fast forward.  The final on screen message is “After five years in prison, there’s no time to lose”.  In cinemas, the words, “Thank you for choosing the original” will be shown in addition.

Key findings of the AFD study
The importance of continuous information through the campaign “Copyright thieves are Criminals” can be seen in the initial results of the new “Available for Download (AFD)” study, carried out by the company P4M for the German Federal Film Board (Filmförderungsanstalt – FFA) in 2006 in order to provide transparency in all aspects of illegal film downloading. The study was based on figures for all 116 cinema films released in German cinemas in the time period from 1st April 2006 to 30th June 2006.  In order to produce as comprehensive and precise a compilation and analysis of all pirate copies on the internet as possible, P4M included all relevant forums, portals, news servers and file-sharing technologies such as eDonkey, BitTorrent and Usenet.  For the determination of download volumes, only BitTorrent was measured.One of the AFD study’s key findings: 100% of films which had cinema audience figures in excess of 50,000 in the first weekend are available online and 80% of those with figures between 10,000 and 50,000.All genres are affected by the online availability of pirate copies.  100% of thrillers, action films, children’s films and animated films are available on the internet.  Horror films (83%) and comedies (73%) are also widely available. 

For drama, the figure is 40% (including both art house films and blockbusters).  In contrast, documentaries were rarely found (6%).  An interesting point is the comparison between download figures and cinema audience figures on the release weekend.  For the film “The Omen”, BitTorrent figures show 82,187 complete downloads for the release weekend – 135,225 watched the film at the cinema.  The film “Ice Age 2” was seen by 2,395,588 people at the cinema – it was also downloaded 121,894 times illegally, via BitTorrent.

Prevention Strategies and Investigation Methods
An important element in the prevention of piracy is the protection of the film at all stages of production.  For this reason, films are not stored in their entirety at one location until they are at completion.  For example, employees at a dubbing studio, only receive individual sequences to work on.  In addition, cinema copies are provided with an individual code for the audio and the video at the production stage.  In this way, the soundtrack of an illegal copy of a film can provide information as to its source.  Another option, the so-called digital watermark, is a digital encoding method which allows automatic search programs to continuously scan the internet for film files containing this code. 

If the program finds such a file, it is possible to trace the film or soundtrack back to discover where it was recorded or stolen.  In addition, software programs which automatically compare originals with copies offer further help in the search for pirate copies on the world wide web.

Investigators are also active offline: in Germany, important places of distribution in the pirate scene are monitored.   This includes, in particular, flea markets and stalls in Eastern European border regions.