Movie industry to file copyright suits

The Motion Picture Association of America announced last week that it would begin filing copyright infringement lawsuits against illegal movie downloaders starting Nov. 16.

With a tentative number of 250 suits to be filed across the nation, the MPAA is following in the footsteps of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed lawsuits against numerous defendants within the past few years.

The organization has not announced where exactly the individuals to be sued are located. The RIAA has targeted student file sharers in particular, and has sued Penn students for copyright infringement.

Many students use Penn's high-speed Internet to share copyrighted music and movies.

MPAA President and Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman called piracy the "greatest threat" to movie industry profits and vowed in a statement to pursue copyright infringers.

"People who have been stealing our movies believe they are anonymous on the Internet, and wouldn't be held responsible for their actions," Glickman said. "They are wrong. We know who they are, and we will go after them, as these suits will prove."

A defendant found culpable may be forced to pay "the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement," according to the U.S. Copyright Act. Legal limitations set damages at a maximum of $30,000 per file and up to $150,000 if the infringement was committed willfully.

The announcement comes at a time when box-office receipts are still strong, DVD sales have increased 33 percent since last year and movie file sharing represents less than 2 percent of all online file sharing. The decreased popularity of movie piracy is possibly due to the comparatively large size of movie files, which require hours to download.

Also, a recent study at the University of California, San Diego's Supercomputer Center showed that -- in the case of MP3 file sharing -- lawsuits have had no effect on the popularity of file sharing among U.S. users compared with last year.

Even so, the MPAA believes it is important to pursue individual online piracy because of its link to greater commercial piracy. John Malcolm, the MPAA director of anti-piracy operations, said in a National Public Radio interview that "almost all piracy of film begins with a camcorder -- people will take a copy that appears on the Web and use burners and replication machines to produce hard-goods piracy."

Public watchdog groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation derided the policy, citing movie industry litigation against VCR usage in the 1980s -- which failed and ended up earning enormous profits for member companies afterwards.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, said that "if the motion picture industry provides easy access to a wide array of movies at a reasonable price -- it will profit handsomely, just as it has for the past 20 years in the home video and DVD market."

Sohn added that "simply bringing lawsuits against individual infringers will not solve the problem of infringing activity over [peer-to-peer] networks." Instead, she urged the industry to develop newer business models that would work with the Internet rather than against it.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF, clarified the organization's proposed solution. "In the end, what protects the studios from piracy is what attracts people to buy or rent movies in the first place -- a good product at a good price point."

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