November 4, 2004 2:38 PM PST

Hollywood lawsuits to strike Net pirates

By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News

Related Stories

Hollywood's new director

 October 18, 2004

Hollywood takes P2P case to Supreme Court

 October 8, 2004

Piracy fears threaten Hollywood innovation

 September 29, 2004

Judge: RIAA can unmask file swappers

 July 27, 2004

Stolen a film? MPAA wants to know

 July 8, 2004

Jack Valenti's curtain call

 June 21, 2004

Hollywood steps up antipiracy campaign

 June 15, 2004

End of an era for file-sharing chic?

 August 25, 2003
update Hollywood studios are about to take the long-anticipated step of firing a barrage of lawsuits at some of the most prolific Internet pirates, echoing the legal strategy that the recording industry already has used with limited success.

The civil lawsuits, which will be filed against individual movie file-swappers starting Nov. 16, represent a kind of legal escalation for an industry that fears its films eventually may be shared on the Internet as widely as songs are today.

"Illegal movie trafficking represents the greatest threat to the economic basis of moviemaking in its 110-year history," Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement released Thursday after a press conference in Los Angeles.

In a follow-up telephone interview, Glickman said he was not prepared to divulge which file-swapping networks would be targeted in the first round of lawsuits. Literature the MPAA distributed lists Kazaa, eDonkey and Gnutella as examples of networks where "illegal digital copies of our member companies' motion pictures" are being traded.

Glickman also would not say whether movie downloaders would be sued, or only those people who make movies available in their shared folders. "We are targeting folks who illegally traffic in these materials," he said. "I'm not going to be more specific."

Until now, the MPAA's member companies were content with a campaign that pressured universities to curb peer-to-peer piracy, sought new laws from Congress, targeted operators of peer-to-peer networks with civil lawsuits, and tried to convince members of the public to visit the RespectCopyrights.org Web site.

But the MPAA's initial legal strategy ran aground in August when a federal appeals court ruled that peer-to-peer network operators such as Grokster and StreamCast Networks--which runs Morpheus--could not be held liable for what individual users do. That landmark decision, coupled with the rapid adoption of broadband connections, appears to have prompted the MPAA to target individual users.

ie8 fix

What's Hot

Discussions

Shared

RSS Feeds

Add headlines from CNET News to your homepage or feedreader.

ie8 fix
  • Recently Viewed Products
  • My Lists
  • My Software Updates
  • Promo
  • Log In | Join CNET