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.”

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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 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?”

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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. 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