SITTING at home in front of your computer at home you can browse through thousands of movie titles and TV shows.
It is an online digital library which pretty much hosts any movie or TV show made in the last 20 years. Do you want to watch Nicholas Cage’s new blockbuster The Sorcerers Apprentice or the latest episode of Glee which only aired only a few hours earlier on FOX? Maybe you feel like watching last night’s ITV episode of I’m A Celebrity Get Me out of Here or Leonardo Di Caprio’s Inception in blue ray quality.
Once you decide what you want to watch it will only take about 30 minutes to download it. In fact, right now, just on torrent site PirateBay, an excess of two million people are trading, uploading and downloading movies.
So then, if everyone is online, happily exchanging movies and TV shows, it begs the question of who actually goes to DVD stores anymore.
“Now the only people that visit DVD stores are those who haven’t figured out how to download yet,” Antonia Georgiou, 31, says grudgingly.
Georgiou now works for a Public Relations firm; she used to be the owner of DVD store Movie Zone in Limassol but had to close it down.
Georgiou used her life savings and took a loan to purchase the DVD store. She had studied Film Studies in New York so it seemed a perfect business idea for her. But her dream quickly turned sour.
“I quickly discovered that I could no longer afford to have the DVD store open. I really don’t see how anyone can,” Georgiou said.
Although she had never burned or ripped a movie before she had the DVD store she quickly learned how to: “I am not ashamed to say it, I used to buy one copy of each movie and burn it and make multiple copies, it was the only way I could stay in business.” Georgiou explains that unless you have great contacts and deal in bulk it’s impossible to get good prices on legitimate DVDs in Cyprus.
The irony of all this is that many DVD shops are now failing largely because of illegal downloads, yet it was basically their own piracy over the years – dating back to the days of video – that has allowed them to survive so long.
Georgiou said: “I used to have pirate movies and downloads, but then as kids became more technologically aware and downloading became more mainstream, customers suddenly had movies before me and in better quality.” Georgiou’s partially pirate DVD store was suddenly being put of business by younger and better ‘pirates’.
“I can definitely see the irony in that. I just don’t think it’s that funny,” she said.
“Also you know Cypriots; they would keep movies for months and sometimes never bring them back at all. So I thought ‘Fine, I’ll burn the movies and you can keep them as long as you want’.”
Then she discovered Minninova, a massive site offering torrents of copyrighted material.
“I suddenly had the world at my fingertips. To download all you need is to be able to surf the net, suddenly I had no costs and the best DVDs in the business. I was like a machine, download and burn, download and burn, download and burn,” boasted Georgiou.
“A very small part of the clientele would insist on only renting out the original, and since I didn’t have one, I basically lost them as customers. Most didn’t care.”
Then late in 2009, Minninova closed down, due to legal action in the Dutch courts, and Georgiou struggled to find a new site to download from.
Things got worse for Georgiou.
“Police raided my store. It was like I was dealing heroin, five, six guys stormed in, some said that they were from the Property Task Force, others from MMAD, it was crazy,” she said.
“I know who called the cops too. I don’t want to say though, let just say it’s a cut throat business out here.”
The police took her computer and most of her films and she now has a court case pending.
“It was terrible, and I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said almost in tears. “A few days later a bunch of kids came in and were telling me about all these new sites popped up, that they now download from. Then I really knew it was over!”
Nikos (not his real name), who owns a well-established DVD club in Nicosia, agrees.
“There is no hope,” he says.
Nikos has had his store since the early 1980s when he started out by renting videos. When Nikos first started out there were no copyright laws in Cyprus and all the video club owners used to copy tapes. “The difference between what we did then and what the kids do now is that there was no law in Cyprus about copyrighted material then.”
He started bringing DVDs in 1999, “I was one of the first to bring DVDs and business was booming for nearly ten years,” Nikos said.
Business started suffering around 2007 when a lot of stores and kiosks started selling pirated DVDs.
“That was bad, but what really hurt us was when people started downloading them at home,” he continued. “I don’t really blame the DVD store owners that download and burn pirated material, if they didn’t then people would just do it themselves at home. At least DVD stores buy some originals from distributors once in a while.”
Nikos predicts that in the next few years there will be no DVD stores left. “As people become more computer literate and as the internet speeds get better, no one will go out and rent DVDs. It’s so easy, you download a movie if you hate it, you don’t have to think I spent x amount to rent it. If you love the movie you can save it. You don’t have to even leave your house.”
He prays that internet downloading stops, but he can’t see that happening. “Piratebay which is one of the biggest illegal sites which people use to download movies even has an MP in the European parliament.”
And then there is also competition from both legal and illegal satellite networks.
“For example you have satellite channel Nova Cyprus, that’s legal, but many people have illegal satellite channels like Nova Greece. They can get up to 15 movie channels at home,” he said.
Nova Cyprus and other legal satellites also provide a service where you can purchase movies to watch. “If someone had the option to watch a new movie from their satellite channel by only paying a small fee, why would they go through the inconvenience of going to a DVD store?”
If huge chains like Blockbuster are close to bankruptcy what chance do small DVD stores have in Cyprus, Nikos asks.
He answers his own question. “No chance.”
Going After the Sites
TAKING legal action against the sites hosting the pirated material is proving to be a gargantuan task reminiscent of lopping off a head of the Hydra.
Stefanos Eliades, 27, a Nicosia-based IT expert explains this is why governments and big companies are picking on the little man at home rather than going after the sites.
He cites the example of Piratebay, who quite rightly call themselves “the most resilient file hosting website in the world”.
Piratebay are based in Sweden, and Eliades says that in the last few years they have been hit with hundreds of law suits, their internet provider has twice ditched them and the police have raided their headquarters on multiple occasions.
“They are still there though. It’s the internet. There is just no off switch. They have servers all over the world; they have countless Virtual Private Networks, they just can’t find them,” says Eliades. “They also don’t host the material; they are like a medium to home users that exchange the files.”
Eliades says that on Piratebay site they post tens of legal notices received from companies like Sony and MGM. “They have even posted a video of the police raid on their headquarters on YouTube. In fact they are considered by many as heroes. They just laugh at the law and keep operating.”
Eliades says that in the last five years the site went offline only once, on May 17 this year due to a ruling against their bandwidth provider. “Access to the website was restored a few hours later with a message laughing off the ban on their front page.”
Eliades believes that big companies like Sony and MGM will soon start going after individuals, since they cannot “mess with the torrent hosting websites”.
Going after the individual
THE legal dangers to individuals of downloading from home are still difficult to quantify as punishments have varied widely from country to country, says lawyer Theodoros Loizou.
“When you download using torrents your IP address is freely viewable by everyone,” he said. “You can get caught downloading or uploading. Although there is a legal distinction from the two, the punishments are the same. Uploading just means you are putting your software on the server so others can download off it.”
In the UK he says that solicitors for Ministry of Sound have sent warning letters to thousands of internet users who they believe have illegally downloaded copyrighted material. “They are very determined to take them to court,” Loizou says.
Loizou says that although the law is clear “it’s hard to say what the punishments are. Rulings around the world have been from one extreme to the other.”
He gives two extremes of the spectrum. On the one hand there is the Minnesota mother of four who has been hit with a $1.5 million fine for downloading 24 songs. She has also been dragged in and out of court for four years.
Loizou laughs and says: “You do realise that she would have received less of a fine if she had broken into a store, stole everything and then torched the place.”
But there is the other side. “In Germany, a kid was caught uploading some copyrighted material and after five years in court, they found him guilty and fined him €30.” Loizou explains that this decision by the Hamburg Regional Court has set a precarious precedent for thousands of smaller cases in the European Union.
“If they want to catch you they will,” warns Eliades. “Big companies also employ staff to trap people into downloading fake torrents so they can collect IP addresses. They manage to collect the IP addresses of thousands of users.”
The companies then send copyright infringement letters to those people’s internet service providers, “who might decide to disable your internet or block certain sites. Plus, the companies will have your details on file.”
In Cyprus, so far, no individual has yet been challenged for downloading material.
