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: ?‖ 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 ?‖ Chernin: .‖ 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.‖

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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 gave 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 dichotomy. 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?‖

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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. the l copies like this or circulated among companies that do special effects, or subtitles. Chernin: ―The other way that pre-released movies end up (stolen) is that people go to … there are lots of screenings that happen in this industry… 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 new 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 going 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

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with each other, with no middleman. All Kazaa does 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 to. On the newest computers, you can just ―burn‖ it onto a DVD and watch it on your big-screen TV. 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

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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: ―Always. You can‘t shut it down.‖ Wayne Rosso is Hollywood‘s enemy. …… 此处隐藏：24776字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……