Steering students away from illegal downloads
15 Mar 2007
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KUALA LUMPUR: While her friends buy tickets to watch Ghost Rider at the cinema, Anastasia (not her real name), 18, waits in front of her computer.
After a few hours, she is watching the movie from the comfort of her room thanks to technology that allows anyone to download the latest cinema offerings from one of the many peer to peer (P2P) websites on the Internet.
"Its fast, its convenient, I dont have to waste time trying to get tickets at the cinema. If I dont like it, I just delete it.
"It only takes a few hours to download a whole movie, depending on the speed of the server, and I dont have to pay a single sen."
Anastasia is not alone. More people were illegally downloading movies, said Motion Pictures Association (MPA) country manager Nor Hayati Yahaya.
"As the technology progresses, and the broadband speed increases, more people are downloading movies through the P2P websites."
This is one of the biggest problems faced by the MPA in Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.
To curb the practice, the association is collaborating with various enforcement agencies such as National ICT and Emergency Response Centre (NISER) and Internet service providers (ISPs) at local universities.
"Some students misuse their university servers to download movies, so ISP at universities are more than happy to help because the illegal downloading clogs up the Internet traffic and slows down their servers."
MPA is also providing guidelines to universities on ways to discourage their students from downloading movies illegally.
On the war against pirated DVDs and VCDs, Nor Hayati said measures taken by the authorities had been effective and Malaysia was no longer on the list of top exporters of pirated discs.
Last year, authorities seized five million discs and other paraphernalia worth RM50 million.
It's not even released on DVD yet. Classy. 
