Tollywood begins all-out piracy war

The Telugu film industry is currently organising a massive co-ordinated effort to fight the scourge of the film business — piracy. And a meeting on October 28, between luminaries of the film industry and the Telangana government may hold the key as plans are in place to start an ‘industry group’ to monitor activities online. The group may start operations before Diwali.   

“We had a meeting with the Telangana IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao,” says producer Suresh Babu. “The group comprised members from the cyber crime unit, various ISPs and people representing the Telugu film industry. The dialogue focused on how troublesome piracy has really become. Every year, Rs 90,000 crore is lost by filmmaking units all over the country to piracy. For T’wood, it’s nearly Rs 350 crore. The meeting concluded with all the groups agreeing and we might, pretty much, start before Diwali.”

With October being the month of big releases and piracy taking a toll on earnings, producers provided some insight into what it takes to fight the pirates. Rajeev Reddy, producer of the recently-released hit, Kanche says, "We now have a team working against online piracy as well as physical piracy (distribution of copies of the film) and we did spend a lot of money on these teams. For Kanche, I heard there was content available online and we tried to take it down.

For my previous film, I myself had to track down a source of an online upload and contacted the owner of the website and asked him to take down the link. But a month later, I received a notice from a Chennai police station saying I had threatened the person." Reddy adds that sometimes, the anti-piracy teams themselves are suspect.

"I had 4-5 teams approach me to handle anti-piracy operations for Kanche. I ended up selecting one team but how do I know the others aren't actually the source of piracy just because they weren't selected or given the contract?

"And that's where the problem lies. Ninety-nine per cent of Tollywood producers have no understanding of technology. There is no systematic approach to control piracy. The impact of piracy in terms of figures will be a very big amount. I believe that all the producers in Tollywood should get together and launch a continuous crackdown which will last at least 3-6 months."