Video Sales Abroad Are Good News in Hollywood. Shhh.: For the last two years, the Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying group for the studios, has claimed that Hollywood loses $3.5 billion every year, almost all of it overseas, to the sale of illegally copied films, mainly on bootleg DVD's and their cheaper Asian equivalent, video compact discs (VCD's).
But the M.P.A.A. is far less forthcoming when asked how much money the Hollywood studios are making on legitimate foreign sales of home video (a category that includes DVD's, VCD's and VHS tapes).
"Those figures are confidential, and we don't release them," said Barbara Berger, a spokeswoman for the M.P.A.A.
