John Abraham and Sonakshi Sinha starrer, Force 2 was released on November 18 last year and the pirated print of the film was also available on the internet on the same day. Due to this the makers of the film facing substantial financial loss at the box-office collection.
The production house Viacom 18 had lodged a complaint with the cyber police against cinema distributor giant K Sera Sera Digital Cinema Ltd (KSS) last week claiming that KSS has infringed Viacom18‘s copyright in the film along with other offences committed under Information Technology Act, Copyright Act and Indian Penal Code.
KSS was one of the firms hired by Viacom18 for Digital Integration of its film ‘Force-2’, wherein the digital content package (DCP) was sent to KSS before the release of the film. In order to tackle the menace of online piracy and identify the leak at source, Viacom18 had developed an internal security mechanism, involving the integration of unique identifiers in each copy of the film before the DCPs were distributed to the Digital Integrators.
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The company spokesperson said in a statement, “It is really frustrating to suffer a loss due to online piracy as tremendous amount of money is invested in production, promotion and distribution of a film. This mechanism developed by us can trace the source of piracy and further strengthens our commitment to battle movie piracy.”
Upon its release and following the leak, big players in the piracy arena saw the opportunity and made the film available on multiple Internet sites including viewing full movie online or to downloading it for free.
Viacom18 said that investigations conducted by it revealed that pirated copies originated from the one that was sent to KSS. The police will soon be questioning the executives and staff of KSS.
Earlier, films like Udta Punjab, Great Grand Masti, Manjhi: The Mountain Man, Tera Kya Hoga Johnny, Paa, Mohalla Assi, and Paanch were also leaked online before/after the official release. Most of these movies were badly affected by the piracy, causing losses to the producers.
