Disney Backs Anti-Piracy Technology for Oscar DVDs

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Disney on Monday plans to become the first major Hollywood film distributor to back an anti-piracy DVD technology that stirred controversy last year in advance of the important Oscar race. Disney said it would release DVD "screeners" – copies of movies sent to groups that vote on awards – only for DVD players made exclusively by a Dolby Laboratories unit, Cinea, and engineered to thwart illegal copying. "We feel like this is a really strong first step in addition to all the other things we do to combat piracy," said Dennis Rice, who heads Disney's Oscar publicity campaign, which will include films such as "Shopgirl" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Holly-wood's awards season is of major importance to the studios because awards help lure moviegoers to theaters, but increasingly screeners have been copied illegally and posted on the Internet or sold in street markets before a film hits theaters. Cinea plans to distribute 12,000 players to members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those peo-ple are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players. Rice said he hoped other studios would follow Disney's lead, but representatives for Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Enter-tainment and General Electric Co.-controlled Universal Pictures said those two studios would not. Others were still considering their options.