Reuters Posted online: Monday, August 16, 2004 at 1256 hours IST
Los Angeles, August 16: Movie studio DreamWorks, which is preparing to spin off its animation unit in an initial public offering, is scrambling to prevent the proliferation of pristine bootleg copies of its hit cartoon Shrek 2, Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety said in its Monday edition.
The official DVD will not reach stores until Nov. 5, but pirated versions have recently turned up in auctions on eBay and on several British online auction sites, Daily Variety said. They were quickly removed, apparently in response to studio requests, the paper added.
While most bootlegs sold on the Web are derived from crudely produced tapes captured surreptitiously in theaters by camcorders, the "Shrek 2" offerings appear to have been struck from a clean, studio copy of the film pilfered during post-production or replication, Daily Variety said.
A spokeswoman for DreamWorks' DVD replicator Technicolor Home Entertainment said the studio has asked it to conduct a forensic analysis of Shrek 2 bootlegs to try to determine their source.
Shrek 2 has earned $435 million at the North American box office, easily ranking as the biggest film of the year. DreamWorks, founded a decade ago by director Steven Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, announced last month it plans to raise $650 million by spinning off its DreamWorks Animation unit.
