最新上外版英语高级视听说上册听力原文

Unit 1

Pirates of the Internet

It’s no secret that online piracy has decimated the music industry as millions of people stopped buying CDs and started stealing their favorite songs by downloading them from the internet. Now the hign-tech thieves are coming after Hollywood. Illegal downloading of full-length feature films is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s becoming easier and easier to do. The people running America’s movie studios know that if they don’t do something----and fast---they could be in the same boat as the record companies. Correspodent: “What’s really at stake for the movie industry with all this privacy?” Chernin: “Well, I think, you know, ultimately, our absolute features.” Peter Chernin runs 20th Century Fox, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. He knows the pirates of the Internet are gaining on him. Correspont: “Do you know how many movies are being downloaded today, in one day, in the United States?” Chernin: “I think it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” Correspondent: “And it’s only going to grow.” Chernin: “It’s only going to grow. √Somebody can put a perfect digital copy up on the internet. A perfect digital copy, all right. And with the click of mouse, send out a million copies all over the world, in an instant.”

5

And it’s all free. If that takes hold, kiss Hollywood goodbye. Chernin recently organized a “summit” between studio moguls and some high

school and college kids---the people most likely to be downloading. Chernin: “And we said, ‘Let’s come up with a challenge. Let’s give them five movies, and see if they can find them online.’ And we all sat around and picked five movies, four of which hadn’t been released yet. And then we came back half an hour later. They had found all five movies that we gav e them. ” Correspondent: “Even the ones that hadn’t even been released yet?” Chernin: “Even the ones that hadn’t even been released yet.” Correspondent: “Did these kids have any sense that they were stealing?” Chernin: “You know it’s… it’s a weird dichotom y. I think they know it’s stealing, and I don’t think they think it’s wrong. I think they have an attitude of, ‘It’s here.’” The Internet copy of last year’s hit Signs, starring Mel Gibson, was stolen even before director M. Night Shyamalan could organize the premiere. Correspondent: “The movie was about to be released. When did the first bootleg copy appear?”

6

Shyamalan: “Two weeks before it or three weeks before it. Before the Internet age, when somebody bootlegged a movie, the only outlet they had was to see it to those vendors on Times Square, where they had the boxes set up outside and they say, ‘Hey, we have Signs---it’s not even out yet.’ And you walk by and you know it’s illegal. But now, because it’s the digital age, you can see, like, a clean copy. It’s no longer the kind of the sleazy guy in Times Square with the box. It’s just, oh, it’s on this

beautiful site, and I have to go, ‘Click.’” Correspondent: “How did those movies get on the Internet? How did that happen?” Chernin: “Through an absolute act of theft. Someone steals a print from the editor’s room; someone steals a print from the person; the composer who’s doing the music…absolute physical theft, steals a print, makes a digital copy, and uploads it.” Correspondent: “And there you go.” Digit al copies like this one of The Matrix Reloaded have also been bootlegged from DVDs sent to reviewers or ad agencies, or circulated among companies that do special effects, or subtitles. Chernin: “The other way that pre-released movies end up (stolen) is th at people go to … there are lots of screenings that happen in this industry… People go to those screenings with a camcorder, with a digital camcorder, sit in the back, turn the camcorder on…”

Correspondent: “And record it.” This is one of those recorded-off-the-screen copies of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Not great quality, but not awful either. And while it used to take forever to download a movie, anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can now have a full-length film in an hour or two.

Saaf: “Well, this is just one of many websites where basically people, hackers if you will, announce their piracy releases.” Randy Saaf runs a company called Media Defender that helps movie studios combat

online piracy.Correspondent: “Look at this, all these n ew movies that I haven’t even seen yet, all here.” Saaf: “ Yep.” Correspondent: “Secondhand Lions that just came out. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in this country who has never downloaded anything. But maybe there is a few others of us out there. So I’m goi ng to ask you to show us Kazaa, that’s the biggest downloading site, right?” Saaf: “Right. This is the Kazaa media desktop. Kazaa is the largest peer-to-peer network.” It’s called peer-to-peer because computer users are sharing files

8

with each other, with no middleman. All Kazaa do es is provide the software to make that sharing possible. When we went online with Randy Saaf, nearly four million other Kazaa users were there with us, sharing every kind of digital file. Saaf: “Audio, documents, images, software, and video. If you wanted a movie, you would click on the video section, and then you would type in a search phrase. And basically what this is doing now, it is asking the people on the peer-to-peer network, ‘Who has Finding Memo’?” Within seconds, 191 computers sent an answer: “We have it.” This is Finding Memo, crisp picture and sound, downloaded free from Kazaa a month before its release for video rental or sale. If you don’t want to watch it on a little computer screen, you don’t have t o. On the newest computers, you can just “burn” it onto a DVD and watch it on your big-screen TV. 5.And that’s a dagger pointed right at the

heart of Hollywood.Chernin: “Where movies make the bulk of their money is on DVD and home videos. 50 percent of the revenues for any movie come out of home video…” Correspondent: “15 percent?” Chernin: “50 percent so that if piracy occurs and it wipes out your home video profits or ultimately your television profits, you are out of business. No movies will get made.” Even if movies did get made, Night Shyamalan says that wouldn’t be any good, because profits would be negligible, so budgets would shrink dramatically. Shyamalan: “And slowly it will degrade what’s possible in that art form.” Rosso: “Technology always wins. Always. You can’t shut it down.” Wayne Rosso is Hollywood’s enemy. They call him a pirate, but officially he’s the president of Grokster, another peer-to-peer network that works just like Kazaa. Correspondent: “Ok, I have downloaded your softwar e.” Rosso: “Right.” Correspondent: “Ok, did I pay to do that?” Rosso: “No, it’s free.” Correspondent: “So who pays you? How do you make money?” Rosso: “We’re like radio. We are advertising-supported.” Correspondent: “And how many people use Grokster?” Rosso: “Ten million.” Correspondent: “Ten million people have used it.” Rosso: “A month.” Correspondent: “Every month, ten million people?” Rosso: “Uh-huh, uh-huh. And growing.”

10

Correspondent: “Use it to download music, movies, software, video games, what else?” Rosso: “I will assume. See, we have no way of

knowing what people are downloading.” Correspondent: “That’s just a fig leaf. You are facilitating, allowing, helping people steal.” Rosso: “We have no idea what the content is, and whatever it is…” Correspondent:“Well, you may not know the specifics, but you know that’s what your site…” Rosso: “And we can’t stop it. We have no control over it.” Correspondent: “But you are there for that purpose, that is why you exist, of course it is.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no,no.” Correspondent: “Come on, this is the fig leaf part.” Rosso: “No, no, no, no, no.” Shyamalan:“He is totally conformable with putting on his site a stolen piece of material. Am I wrong in that? If my movie was bootlegged, he’d be totally comfortable putting it on his site?” Correspondent: “Because I have nothing to do with it.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right.” Correspondent: “Because I just provided the software.” Shyamalan:“Yeah, right. So, immediately, how can you ever have a

11

conversation with him? Because he’s taken a stolen material and he is totally fine with passing it around in his house. All these, all these are illegal activities. So, I’m not, it’s just my house, I’m not doing anything wrong.” But it is Rosso who has the law on his side. A federal judge has ruled that Grokster and other file-swapping networks are not liable for what their downloaders are doing. Rosso: “So we are completely legal, and unfortunately this is something the entertainment

industry refuses to accept. They seem to think the j udge’s decision was nothing but a typo.” The studios are appealing that court ruling. And they may follow the music industry and begin to sue individuals who download movies. And they are fighting the pirates in other ways, with ads about people whose jobs are at risk because of the piracy---people like the carpenters and painters who work on film sets. At the same time, Hollywood is trying to keep copies of movies from leaking in the first place. Chernin: “ You will very seldom go to an early screening of a movie right now where, probably you don’t notice until you pay attention, someone’s not in the front of that auditorium with infrared binoculars looking for somebody with a camcorder.”

12

And once a movie is released, or copies do begin to leak, the studios hire people like Randy Saaf to hack the hackers. Saaf: “What we’re just trying to do is make the actual pirated content difficult to find. And the way we do that is by, you know, serving up fake files.” It’s called “spoofing.” Saaf and his employees sp end their days on Kazaa and Grokster, offering up thousands of files that look like copies of new movies, but aren’t. Correspondent: “So if I had clicked on any number of those Finding Nemo offerings, I could have clicked on one of yours, or somebody like you. And what would I have found after my hour and a half of downloading?” Saaf: “it might just be a blank screen or something.