While children waited excitedly for the nationwide release of the latest Harry Potter film, rumours were circulating that movie pirates were circulating illegal copies on the internet.
Conflicting statements from the Warner Bros movie studio, which owns the rights to the Harry Potter series, didn't clear up the mystery as to whether Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had remained safe from bootleggers.
Last Tuesday, Warner Bros said an illegal copy was being bootlegged over the web. Then the studio revised its statement because it wasn't sure whether the file was a copy of the film, which cost nearly £80 million to make, or a decoy.
Reports later claimed the film had been downloaded more than 500 times from one European site, although, because of the time needed to download movie files, they also could not confirm if the file contained an actual copy of the film.
The studio issued a statement saying: "The illegal copying and distribution of movies is theft. Warner Bros takes the threat to internet privacy very seriously and employs all legal means to contain the unauthorised copying and distribution of our films on the internet."
Telesyncing, the process of filming an unreleased movie using a camcorder and then uploading it to the internet with a PC, has plagued recent releases, such as Spiderman and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Copies, often poor quality, regularly show up on the internet before films are officially released.
By the end of last week, the film studio said it had opened a copy of the film on the internet and found it to be an empty file. But experts said this shouldn't detract from the scale of the problem.
Estimates indicate more than 500,000 movie files are downloaded from the internet every day, although the 500Mb average size of the files mean they can take an hour or more to process.
Five major Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros, have launched a legitimate online movieon-
demand service in the United States.
Movielink enables people to download films using a high-speed internet connection for up to about £3 a time. The files take about an hour to download using a broadband connection and can be watched using media players from RealNetworks and Microsoft.
The quality is similar to a VHS tape. The movies can be watched an unlimited number of times in a 24-
hour period before they delete themselves.
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