Still from Delhi Belly

Piracy is not restricted to the high seas alone. Closer home, pirates of a different genre are bleeding the film industry dry. Where an original CD could cost Rs 100 upwards, a pirated one costs Rs 30. This has left not only Mollywood but other industry segments with huge revenue losses.

However, there is a new saviour in town called Agent Jadoo — an anti piracy software, launched a few weeks ago. Agent Jadoo is the brainchild of actor /director/engineer Prakash Bhare, techie Stephen Antony, Rashid MA a legal consultant and advocate C.P. Unnikrishnan, a high court lawyer.
Explaining the reasons for launching this new software Prakash says, “Digital media took centre stage in the movie business a couple of decades ago and audiences got access to content through television, tapes, disks, flash drives and so on making it easy to pirate films. This led to two thirds of Kerala’s theatres closing down and yearly film production being reduced to half. Agent Jadoo targets the umbilical cord of piracy —the Internet, which feeds other forms these days.’’ A number of M’Town films have used the services of Agent Jadoo like Diamond Necklace, Thattathin Marayathu, Spirit and Chattakkari.
Agrees Abhinay Deo, director of Delhi Belly, “Piracy is eating into a major chunk of our business. Filmmakers work really hard to reach audiences through their work but illegal uploads of songs and videos affect profits. A software like this is the need of the hour as it’s important to tell people that piracy is illegal and can get one in trouble. Today most educated people put up new releases on various websites without realising how these can affect the complete strategy of a director who wants to reach the masses in his own way. Bollywood or any film industry will definitely benefit from such an initiative.’’
Director Lal Jose of Diamond Necklace is gung ho about Agent Jadoo. He says, “Any person, anywhere in the world, who uploads any songs or films illegally onto any site, will get a direct warning and be served with a legal notice! This software is vigilant 24 hours of the day. Sadly, the industry is also to blame as there has been huge negligence from our side.’’
Allison Patel, director of the film ?, says that such software applications may help but not completely. “The system of filmmaking that we follow in India is not very standard. Yash Dave and I, being technical students tried hard to prevent our film from being downloaded illegally but it still was. We released our film on the Internet for viewers in the US, but within hours it was being watched in India as well. We couldn’t do anything even after being technically aware,” he says.
Agent Jadoo has servers around the world and processes to monitor, detect and tackle piracy related activities on the net. Says Prakash, “Content owners sign up with us and authorise us to act on their behalf. We work with them and the law enforcement agencies as required. We have been able to ensure zero piracy for all the films protected by Agent Jadoo!’’
However, according to Allison, software like Agent Jadoo may only give a short-term solution. “But to stop piracy completely, the Indian film industry needs to work hard. It will take a lot of time before we finally come up with fool-proof solution,” he says.
All said and done, this jadoo is certainly working in M’Town, at least for now and one hopes other segments of the Indian film industry will soon be able to test its effectiveness as well!