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WASHINGTON--Prominent champions of tougher copyright enforcement from the entertainment, media and publishing industries took over a stately Capitol Hill caucus room on Thursday, staging an expo aimed at playing up the legal protections' importance to their livelihood.

The event was put on by the Copyright Alliance, which formed earlier this year to promote the "vital role" of copyright in the U.S. economy and job market, encourage inclusion of copyright protection requirements in trade agreements, urge tougher civil and criminal penalties for piracy, and dissuade any weakening of copyright law. Its 42 members include heavy hitters like the Recording Industry Association of America, the Association of American Publishers, the Motion Picture Association of America, Microsoft, Viacom, NBC Universal and Walt Disney.

Most of the major players had booths at Thursday's shindig, and some of their messages were hardly subtle.

The RIAA hung wrinkled T-shirts that read in bold print: "feed a musician, download legally."

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BitTorrent search engine IsoHunt is cutting off access in the U.S. to software that enables users to download BitTorrent files, the technology that has become a powerful tool for illegal file sharing.

Gary Fung, IsoHunt's founder, said Wednesday that the decision is a result of a copyright lawsuit hanging over the company's head. The Motion Picture Association of America filed suit against IsoHunt and competitor TorrentSpy last year, accusing them of encouraging copyright violations.

IsoHunt and TorrentSpy, which elected to shut off access to its site last month to U.S. residents, are trying to avoid a … Read more

The irony of the MediaDefender case is that while one segment of the entertainment industry huddles with FBI agents over the theft of e-mails, another segment has acknowledged purchasing stolen e-mails.

In court papers made public last month, the Motion Picture Association of America disclosed that it paid a hacker $15,000 for private e-mails belonging to TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent tracking site. The MPAA, which said it was unaware that the e-mails were stolen, has accused TorrentSpy of encouraging copyright violations.

Then came startling revelations about the tactics employed by MediaDefender, an antipiracy company that tries to thwart illegal file … Read more

WASHINGTON--If the movie industry gets its way, then your Internet service provider may one day start playing a greater role in keeping pirated content off its networks.

Motion Picture Association of America Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said Tuesday that his industry has been attempting to "deepen our relationship" with telephone, cable and Internet companies "because we're all in this together."

"Their revenue bases depend on legitimate operations of their networks and more and more they're finding their networks crowded with infringed material, bandwidth space being crowded out," Glickman told an audience … Read more

MediaDefender, a company that offers to protect copyright content from illegal file sharing, saw private internal e-mails leaked to the Web over the weekend. The e-mails appear to reveal some controversial tactics used by the firm to fight piracy.

The e-mails indicate that MediaDefender, which works closely with the music and movie industries, may have been secretly behind MiiVii, a Web site that promised to enable people to upload and download copyright movies, TV shows and music, according to a report Sunday evening in The Wall Street Journal.

The e-mails indicate that the site was a ruse. The MiiVii software … Read more

Anti-piracy pooches are rushing to the MPAA's rescue.

Two specially trained Labradors recently uncovered thousands of bootlegged DVDs during police raids in Queens, NY., according to the Motion Picture Assoc. of America. In addition to the scores of bogus films, the raids netted three arrests.

Three-year-olds, Lucky and Flo, are believed to be the first dogs trained to recognize the polycarbonate scent of optical discs, according to the Motion Picture Assoc. of America.

To teach the dogs to track down the discs, the polycarbonate scent was placed on tennis balls, which were then hidden. The dogs were taught to … Read more

A federal judge issued a decision on Monday that would have required TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent search engine, to hand over information about its users had the company not ceased operating in the U.S. a day earlier.

TorrentSpy, accused of encouraging movie piracy in a lawsuit filed by the film industry last year, was ordered in June to provide the studios with user information found in the company's computer RAM. The site, which is often used by file sharers to find bootleg films, had long promised to protect the anonymity of visitors.

TorrentSpy filed an appeal and argued that … Read more

Hollywood hasn't decided what it thinks about the whole "Net neutrality" debate, but it knows one thing: Any rules that would stunt roll-out of the next new whiz-bang filtering technologies or encourage unfettered sharing of copyrighted works over peer-to-peer networks would be very, very bad.

That's the gist of the 9-page comments (PDF) that the Motion Picture Association of America filed with the Federal Communications Commission this week. Monday was the deadline for comments for an FCC inquiry into "broadband industry practices," and most of the some 27,000 filings focused on the thorny … Read more

TorrentSpy, the torrent-file search engine accused by Hollywood of aiding copyright violators, plans to remove links from its search results to pirated content using a new filtering system.

FileRights is an automated filtering system created by some of TorrentSpy's founders, including Justin Bunnell, according to a statement released Monday. The technology uses "hash" values to automatically remove links to infringing works from search engines that subscribe to the service.

The move comes as TorrentSpy fights a lawsuit brought against it last year by the major film studios. TorrentSpy suffered a legal blow earlier this month when the … Read more