In a not so surprising move the MPAA is set to announce today that it will follow the music industry’s lead and start filing civil suits against individual movie downloaders.
While Video Business did not have any actual figures on how many suits would be handed out and when exactly they would be going out but speculation is that the first round of lawsuits could number in the hundreds.
This move comes less than three months after former MPAA head Jack Valenti resigned his post, he was reportedly against studio suggestions to start suing consumers.
Video Business went on to report that the Recording Industry Assn. of America has sued more than 4,000 individual so far and has succeeded in raising awareness but Fred Von Lohmann, a staff attorney at “cyber-liberties” group Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “Lawsuits against file sharers don’t appear to do any good… and movie studios are fantastically successful right now. There’s no evidence that file sharing is hurting their bottom line.”
Helpful or not the MPAA estimates that bootleg DVD piracy costs the industry more than $3.5 billion a year and claims much of it is transmitted via P2P networks.
