Audio Video News

What's going on these days? Pirates are attacking everywhere. Already bored with DVD, pirates have set their spyglass on Blu-ray.

Authorities in China, home of the most voracious pirates in the video business, seized a stash of over 800 illegally pirated Blu-ray titles, showing that the robust copy-protection that Blu-ray was supposed to have is useless.

What's most offensive is that this pirate's booty wasn't even direct copies of the Blu-ray discs to Blu-ray. The pirates rip the movies from Blu-ray to . . .

DVD. Yup, using AVCHD compression, the 1080 Blu-rays are compressed and down-converted to files small enough to fit on a DVD. Yuck! Unfortunately, they look good enough to fool some consumers. However, the discs lack most of the bonus features that fit on Blu-ray, and even the soundtracks are affected.

The discs, seized in Shenzhen, China, were packaged in realistic-looking Blu-ray boxes, complete with  the authenticating holograms. The Motion Picture Association Internation said that this is the first ever seizure of these types of discs.

Pirates on Blu-ray are good. Pirated Blu-rays are very bad, on many levels. —Leslie Shapiro

The Wall Street Journal