This summer Hollywood raked in well over $4 billion in US box office alone. An impressive financial achievement defying claims by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), that the industry is being gutted. The MPAA is obsessed with pirates and not the rum drinking, treasure hunting, charming anti-hero Captain Jack Sparrow, that Johnny Depp made famous. Though with the $2.7 billion that the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' franchise reaped from its three movies and related tie-ins, I'd say being preoccupied with Depp would be more understandable. No, the MPAA lives in fear of big bad movie pirates who are waiting to plunder all those hard earned move profits off their backs. They have been sounding the alarm that the pirates are attacking since 2005 when there was a shocking 5.7 percent slump in box office revenue. Rather than blame that year's poor showing on the turkeys they released like 'Alone in the Dark', 'Dukes of Hazard' and 'Stealth' they found another culprit. Now don't get me wrong piracy is a big problem but is it the only reason for limp releases or just a convenient scapegoat? So in the interest of public safety, I decided to see if those dreaded ships had in fact landed on Hollywood's shores ready to carry off our beloved movies and burn the theaters to the ground.

One visit to the MPAA website will show how serious they are about piracy. It says 'The Magic of the Movies' but almost everything on it is piracy awareness, definitions, statistics, warnings and such. All the news items are about Chinese DVD players recalled for violating content or new senate bills cracking down on university P2P networks. Then there is the stuff about movie thieves, who are they, catching movie thieves and joining the fight to stop movie thief Armageddon. There is even a counter showing how many arrests have been made and how many pirated DVDs had been confiscated-81 million to date. Interestingly enough there is nothing at all about this being Hollywood's best summer of record. Obsessed? Maybe a little. Aggressive? I think so. Whatever happened to the magic of the movies or have the marauders kidnapped that too? The industry is profitable and setting records so why is the paranoia level so disproportionately high? Are there really eye patch wearing, cutlass wielding barbarians hiding behind every movie poster or is the MPAA crying wolf one too many times?

I was once given a copy of a movie that was still playing in theaters. The friend who passed it on to me did not tell me much about its provenance but since I am in the industry and accustomed to getting early screeners from directors and such I assumed it was such. To my surprise it was a grainy, jerky copy that had clearly been made by an audience member during a theater performance. This was my first time actually watching a part of a pirated movie but not my first encounter with one. Almost every regular rider of the New York subway system has come across them. Men and women with backpacks and messenger bags from which they fish out a video store worth of DVDs, each encased in plastic sleeves and printed with off color artwork. They are a regular sight, pleasant and polite as they go about their business. Riders shake their heads or rifle curiously through the selections (some in multiple languages) and no one thinks twice about them or about the customers who ultimately decide to purchase 'Bee Movie' for $5, instead of paying $12 at the theaters. The director of 'El Cantante,' a biopic starring real life married couple Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony has even been offered copies of his own movie in several states and countries.

These are the gentle face of the MPAA's monster. And it is not only on the rails that they ply their wares. Restaurants in Queens are inundated by them; '30 Days of Night', 'Michael Clayton', 'Elizabeth; The Golden Age', 'Fred Claus', 'American Gangster', 'P2', they are veritable walking box office marquees. Their product quality is as varied as their selection, ranging from near pristine copies (the most sought after) taken sometime during the post production process to almost unwatchable camcorder copies shot surreptitiously in a theater, like the copy I was given. The lower end is characterized by artifacts such as heads of theater goers popping in and out of frame; background noise and occasional loss of focus or picture stability. And buyer beware your $5 purchase of 'Saw IV' may not be exactly what was shown at your local AMC multiplex. You can find as many as five different versions of a bootleg movie on the street and even more variation online, each with different music, scenes and endings. This can be attributed to the fact that some movies are copied during the editing process (they even have the time code stamp in the picture) and the final cut and mix has not yet been confirmed. This space between editing and final print is a windfall for pirates since directors and editors habitually send out disks of works in progress to studios, dubbing companies and print labs for comment, feedback or alterations. A well placed bribe to an insider anywhere along this vulnerable chain and it's 'Oops a funny thing happened on the way to the print house'. It takes less than an hour to copy a movie and with offers of tens of thousands of dollars for a hot title, sometimes temptation is hard to resist.

In China Town or Washington Heights both immigrant neighborhoods, cheap bootlegs are a big, booming, competitive business and the police can't do much in the way of curbing it. Occasionally the men in blue descend with sniffer dogs to seek out and seize a horde of counterfeit DVDs, hauling away the offending party. But this is merely for show; they know it is futile because the next day another vendor will take their place. It is a surreal, topsy-turvy crime underworld where the criminals are not gun toting, horse head chopping mafia caricatures but seemingly harmless mom and pop dealers with high tech duplicators and intricate distribution systems, peacefully violating copyright laws.

One weapon that some directors have wielded to counteract theater piracy is simultaneous big screen and DVD releases of their movies. Indie god Steven Soderbergh made headlines when he put out his film 'Bubble Boy' in theaters, DVD and pay-per-view at the same time. The movie was not a success and did not do much to promote this route as a viable solution to rampant piracy. In any case this method is complicated because there are two camps with slightly different goals to consider. One group is the studios and as far as they are concerned the faster they can get their movie out on DVD and start reaping the huge proceeds the better. In the other corner you have theater owners who fear that simultaneous releases will cannibalize the box office and seriously cut into their already small profit margin. You see the longer a movie plays on screen the bigger the theater's share becomes and the less goes to the studios that reap their reward during the first few weeks of release. So you can see the conflict of interest between two people who are essentially still sleeping together.

According to the MPAA ninety percent of piracy is done by camcorder in movie theaters. Camcorders have become smaller and easier to conceal and now cell phones and digital cameras also have video recording capabilities. This has led to some theaters adopting draconian zero tolerance laws that leave no leeway for extenuating circumstances. Such as the case of Jhannet Sejas who was celebrating her 19th birthday watching the hit movie 'Transformers' at a Washington theater when she decided to film 20 seconds of the ending as a promo to encourage her little brother to go see it. She was arrested and charged with illegally recording a motion picture. Sejas who had never been in trouble before and works two jobs to pay for college swore she only wanted to show the clip to her brother to convince him to see the movie and not to sell it. She is banned for life from the theater, faces a fine of $ 2 500 and up to a year in jail. Copying a motion picture from a theater performance is a felony under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, punishable by up to three years in a federal prison. It is hard for Hollywood to come across as the wounded party in cases like these where unintentional infringement is so severely punished. If the industry starts being overly suspicious of everyone a backlash is soon to follow as it has in the recording industry.

Instead of treating movie goers as criminals studios should try to ensure that both the theater and DVD watching experience is so much more enjoyable than pirated alternatives. Take the soaring price of DVDs and movie tickets for starters. Theater passes now average $6.85, up $0.30 from last year. Movie pirates with their sophisticated distribution methods and on the cheap duplication give options to people who do not have the means to go to the multiplex or afford a 'Ratatouille' DVD at 20 bucks a pop. Piracy is a huge problem and not one that will be solved in the courts but by making it easier for movie lovers to view and buy legitimate content. As for that illegal screener I got from my friend, I have already preordered DVDs of the same movie and when it is released December 4th I will give them to my friend as a Christmas gift. I figured that was penance enough for my guilt, the movie was 'Pirates of the Caribbean- At World's End.' I kid you not.