MPAA Steps Up War on Piracy

Hollywood movie studios announced Tuesday that they had opened up a new legal front in their war on piracy, launching an international crackdown on middlemen who had eluded industry attempts to stem illegal video downloading.

Executives of the Motion Picture Assn. of America said at a news conference that they no longer were targeting just individual file swappers suspected of copyright infringement. The studios have sued or sought criminal charges against scores of people who have helped pirates find movies to download through three popular file-sharing programs.

So far, the MPAA said, the lawsuits are targeting people in the U.S. and Britain who help users of BitTorrent software copy movies illegally. The MPAA’s chief anti-piracy official, John Malcolm, called the unnamed defendants “parasites, leeching off the creativity of others.”

An undisclosed number of criminal actions, meanwhile, were brought in France, Finland and the Netherlands against people facilitating movie piracy not only with BitTorrent but also with eDonkey and Direct Connect. More such actions are expected in other countries.

“We cannot just sit back and let Internet pirates brazenly steal our movies and other intellectual property,” MPAA President Dan Glickman said. “The film industry believes digital delivery of entertainment holds great promise if we can protect it from thieves long enough to give it a chance to grow.”

The MPAA has said that black-market sales of illegally copied videotapes and DVDs is costing the film industry more than $3.5 billion annually. The studios worry that as video downloading becomes faster and less detectable, billions of dollars more potentially could be lost each year.

The announcement of the MPAA’s action comes just days after the Supreme Court granted a request by Hollywood studios to hear arguments in the landmark Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. vs. Grokster file-sharing case. A lower court had rejected copyright-infringement claims brought against two distributors of file-sharing software, Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc.

The MPAA’s latest assault on piracy also comes on the eve of a Federal Trade Commission conference during which policymakers and industry officials will examine the new peer-to-peer services.

Since they emerged five years ago, peer-to-peer networks have grown in popularity and sophistication, despite lawsuits against software developers and nearly 7,000 individuals accused of trading copyrighted music and movies online.

The individuals targeted in the latest MPAA action act like virtual telephone operators, connecting numerous computer users around the world so they can trade huge files such as movies, video games and computer software over the Internet.

The most sophisticated of the three programs involved, BitTorrent, has been particularly difficult to corral. Unlike competing file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and eDonkey, it doesn’t link all of its users into a network that can be monitored easily and searched for copyrighted works.

“There has been a lot of buzz about BitTorrent and the difficulty in thwarting it,” said Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington watchdog group that follows copyright issues. “The MPAA is trying to show a strong response in the hope they will have a deterrent effect” on pirates.