Motion Picture Association releases trailer about film piracy in Asia-Pacific

SINGAPORE (AP) - Hollywood has stepped up its fight against movie piracy in Asia with the release of an anti-piracy trailer in Singapore. The 30-second trailer shows a thief, swinging in from a helicopter and dodging lasers, trying to steal a DVD. He is later caught. More than 30 cases of pirated movies, filmed with handheld video cameras in theatres, have been traced to the Asia-Pacific region in the past two years, said Motion Picture Association Executive Vice President Fritz Attaway.

"As we tackle this problem in our cinemas across North America and in Europe, we anticipate that even more will come from the Asia-Pacific region," Attaway told reporters Monday.

In the last week, the MPA discovered 14 recordings in Malaysia of the new "Spider-Man 3" movie, senior operations executive Neil Gane told The Associated Press.

Such recordings are typically sold to illegal DVD factories for mass reproduction or posted on the Internet, sometimes just hours after the film's release.

Localized versions of the anti-piracy trailer, to be shown before screenings of movies, will be distributed to other countries in the region in the next two months, Gane said.

The MPA says its members - including top Hollywood studios Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Universal - lost $1.2 billion to Asia-Pacific movie pirates last year.

The Canadian Press, 2007