The Matrix v the pirates

It was planned with perfect military precision. Yesterday, Matrix Revolutions, the final film in the science-fiction trilogy, was released at exactly the same time in 107 countries: 6am in Los Angeles, 2pm in London, 5pm in Moscow and 11pm in Tokyo.

This unprecedented distribution strategy was touted as making the event more exciting for Matrix fans, but it had a more crucial purpose - as the most audacious salvo in Hollywood's war on piracy.

By releasing it simultaneously in so many countries - including, for the first time, China, a major centre of piracy - Warner Bros hopes to take the wind out of the pirates' tawdry sails.

Warners is also employing other war-like tactics. At many of the film's early screenings, audience members were subjected to body searches, while security personnel wearing night-vision goggles scoured the theatres to make sure no one was taping the film with digital video cameras.

In the past few months, highquality pirated digital copies of films have appeared on the net, on market stalls and shopping streets. I watched the second Matrix instalment on a perfect DVD copy in a Mexican café before the film was released. And much of Hollywood was stunned when a high-quality digital copy of The Hulk appeared on file-sharing networks on the internet a couple of weeks before its premiere.

Illegal copies of more than half the films released by Hollywood now become available on the net within hours of their release in cinemas. Highspeed internet and digital technology have allowed around 400,000 people to download movies off the net in a couple of hours. Studios know that unless they act now, that figure will rise dramatically.

Independent estimates claim film studios are losing $3.5 billion a year to piracy. "There is no issue in my life I take as seriously as this," says Peter Chernin, president of 20th Century Fox. "But if we remain focused on it, maybe it won't kill us."

Hollywood executives are determined not to make the same mistakes as their cousins in the record business, who have become incapable of developing an effective strategy against piracy. The results have been disastrous - CD sales, for instance, are down almost a fifth this year.

Until recently, Hollywood's main problem with piracy was the sale on the street of VHS or DVD copies. Most, though, were of relatively poor quality and tended to be bought by people in poorer countries who couldn't afford to see the films in cinemas anyway. The movies also needed subtitling or dubbing - in China, for example, where 90 per cent of the DVDs sold are pirated, translations are often of a poor standard.

But now, movies can be downloaded with computers powerful enough to handle such large digital material. And the masterminds behind this are a mix of movie insiders, sophisticated criminals and students with high-speed internet connections. "Today's pirates have evolved from back-room operations into technology-driven criminal syndicates," says Marta Grutka, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.