Summit Entertainment Has Solution for Piracy: No More DVD Screeners for the Oscars

It’s common practice for major studios to send out DVD screeners before awards season, especially each November and December, as the Academy Awards are looming in. Summit Entertainment, though, believes this is one of the aspects that make online piracy such a breeze and wants to end the tradition.

The Hollywood Reporter says the movie studio is going out with guns a-blazing against movie pirates, trying to cut off at least one of their sources: DVD screeners for awards consideration.

After all, it may be new on the scene, but Summit already knows what it’s like to have your movie leaked ahead of release and how badly this can influence sales, especially if it’s not a movie that has been getting a lot of hype prior to it coming out.

As we also informed you a while back, “The Hurt Locker” leaked on torrent sites pre-release and not even winning Best Oscar and impressive reviews could get audiences to see it in theaters when it came out later.

So, the movie studio wants all other movie studios in Hollywood to stop sending screeners because they (the screeners) will inevitably leak and thus no one will want to pay money for the film when it comes out in theaters or on DVD.

“It’s something we have to get away from,” Kaye Cooper Mead, Summit’s executive VP worldwide distribution services, says, as cited by THR.

“Those screeners are a source of leaks, and when they leak, it’s a very serious leak because it’s a much better copy than the pirated ones,” Mead explains.

However, since these are screeners for the awards season, therein lies the problem: perhaps more studios would second the proposition since they too know screeners represent a huge risk, but how does one get voters to vote for a film they haven’t seen.

THR says a solution may also be using better security elements.

“In 2003, screeners were briefly banned over piracy concerns, but that didn’t last long. Increased safety measures, such as watermarking individual discs, have cut down on the problem and made tracing leaks easier,” the e-zine says.

So far, they’ve worked well – and will do so better if improved.

“In 2004, for instance, the FBI prosecuted actor and Academy voter Carmine Caridi, 70, for shipping dozens of screener DVDs to a friend in Illinois who ripped and uploaded the movies. The feds were able to track down Caridi because the screeners were watermarked,” THR says.