ARE MOBILE PHONES REALLY THAT BIG OF A PIRACY THREAT? (GUA, THR)

By R. Kinsey Lowe

The next time you're at a pre-opening screening of a big movie and you're asked to relinquish your mobile phone to security subcontractor employees in the name of piracy prevention -- consider this: How secure do you feel about leaving your private information in the hands of a stranger? I didn't think so.

Are movie screenings really so vulnerable to mobile-phone piracy? Well, unless you've got a 10 or more megapixel camera and your battery's good for more than three hours of strenuous processing power, the answer is "not bloody likely."

Yes, higher-resolution camera-phones and increased memory card capacity theoretically make it practical to use a phone to record a movie -- that is, "if a tenfold increase in battery life were to take place tomorrow," Doctorow notes.

When pressed, copyright officials and movie distributors in the U.K. conceded to Doctorow "that the majority of pirate movies originate with camcorders" during commercial showings in theaters, according to Doctorow's story in the Guardian, and that "film previews have never been a source of film piracy."

Movie piracy, it seems, is far more often "an inside job" -- the result of digital files pilfered from post-production servers or from DVD screeners sent to Oscar and other awards voters and members of the media.

Even the widely reported pirating of an early copy of "Wolverine" was traced to an inside source at the producing studio Fox, which even fired one of the Fox News Channel's contributors for "reviewing" the pirated version of the movie.

The truth is, according to professional tech rabble-rouser and sci-fi author Doctorow, the private information on your phone is a lot more vulnerable to theft than the movie you're about to watch.

The risk is substantial.

From sim card cloning (copying the phone's sim so that other phones can use your account, listen to your voicemail, and make calls that are billed to you) to data theft, the risks are enormous. Think of the data storage on your phone � that potential 64GB on a postage-stamp-sized SD card. That's enough to carry around libraries' worth of confidential or proprietary information ... Add to that the contact information � personal phone numbers for all the people in the lives of everyone at the movie ... VIPs and otherwise.

And the security on mobile phones is terrible. For one thing passwords are notoriously insecure, and encryption is virtually nonexistent.

Of course, the risks for your phone and for the studios and their movies are, strictly speaking, hypothetical.

But to minimize liability for screening attendees forced to turn over their handsets to dubiously qualified strangers, Doctorow suggests studios purchase insurance to to cover losses due to data breaches. Or refocus their preventive strategies where they could be more effective -- inside their studio, production and marketing facilities.