[originaltext]Every year around now, tens of thousands of DVDs of movies still

Every year around now, tens of thousands of DVDs of movies still playing in theaters are sent by Hollywood studios to Oscar, Golden Globe and other awards voters. Every year, some of these discs are copied, and the movies end up being shared online. This time, studios are taking a new approach to prevent this kind of piracy, and technology is playing a big part. Ahead of Screen Actors Guild awards, Fox Searchlight this month became the first studio to have nearly 100 000 voters view new movies such as Black Swan through a free download from Apple Inc.’s iTunes store. Paramount Pictures and other studios did the same later with movies such as The Fighter and The Kids Are All Right. In all cases, downloads are set to expire 24 hours after being viewed and are not available to the public. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that $25 billion globally is lost to piracy every year, and it is partly responsible for US DVD sales falling from a peak in 2006 at $20.2 billion to about $14 billion now. Although the industry group says most of the damage comes from handheld video camera recordings in theaters, awards screeners are still a problem. In the past, studios went as far as sending voters specialized players equipped with stronger copy protections than regular DVDs, but that system was abandoned years ago as being too troublesome. So most studios continue to send discs to voters by mail— as many as 20 000 per movie. And the risk of leaks remains.
9. What will happen if the discs of movies are copied?
10. What can we know about the movies downloaded from the Apple iTunes store?
11. What is one of the reasons for the reduction of US DVD sales from 2006?
12. How did the studios protect their DVDs from being copied in the past?