As we said earlier today the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is ready to battle against on-line piracy in a similar made taken by teh Recording Industry, by suing those doing the taking.
The MPAA announced today from the renowned School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA, its lawyers will expand the MPAA’s campaign to prevent film piracy, working with its members and other film studios to file lawsuits against people who have illegally traded digital copies of movies over the Internet.
“Illegal movie trafficking represents the greatest threat to the economic basis of movie-making in its 110-year history,” said MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman, who was joined during the announcement by studio executives, union leaders, filmmakers and others. “People who have been stealing our movies believe they are anonymous on the Internet, and wouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. They are wrong. We know who they are, and we will go after them, as these suits will prove.”
A recent federal interagency report estimates that counterfeit and pirated goods, including those of copyrighted works, cost the American economy $250 billion a year. In response to the report, the U.S. Justice Department and other federal agencies have committed to increased law-enforcement and prosecutorial efforts against pirated and counterfeit goods. The MPAA estimates “hard goods” movie piracy costs the film industry $3.5 billion a year. That total does not include losses from hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads swapped over the Internet each day.
“We all know that digital distribution is the wave of the future, and the studios have all supported legal download services in various ways,” Glickman said. “But we cannot allow illegal trafficking to derail legitimate new technologies that provide consumers with affordable, convenient access to high-quality movies on the Web. Trading a digital file of a movie online without paying its owners is no different than walking into a store and shoplifting a DVD.”
California Governor Arnold “The Governator” Schwarzenegger backed the decision saying, “I applaud the decision by the MPAA and its member companies to take strong action, and I join the U.S. Department of Justice, the State of California, the recording industry and others in making sure that people use the great promise of the Internet responsibly and ethically, and that motion pictures remain an important part of California and the nation’s economy in the decades to come.”
Lawsuits will be filed against individual file-swappers across the country beginning Nov. 16 by MPAA member companies. The civil suits seek damages and injunctive relief. Under the Copyright Act, statutory damages can be as much as $30,000 for each separate motion picture illegally copied or distributed by an individual over the Internet, and as much as $150,000 per motion picture if such infringement is proven to be willful.
So, if you have been downloading movies and distributing them via such peer-2-peer programs as KaZaA, I am not quite sure where you fall in the MPAA’s focus, but it is quite obvious they tend to make examples of those doing the taking. While the recording indsutry’s attempt to stop piracy through lawsuits was relatively unsuccessful seeing how P2P memberships haven’t slowed down, continuing threats of lawsuits are sure to weigh on the minds of many.
For more from the MPAA check out their current releases here.
