Spring Break
Motion Picture Association of America lawsuits futile
Cork Board
By: Paul Corkery
Issue date: 11/19/04 Section: Sci-Tech
Originally published: 11/18/04 at 10:22 PM EST
Last update: 11/19/04 at 1:37 PM EST
Originally published: 11/18/04 at 10:22 PM EST
Last update: 11/19/04 at 1:37 PM EST
|
This may sound familiar, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been engaged in similar action against music downloaders for several months, successfully suing over 6,000 individuals for copyright violation.
The initial wave of lawsuits will be filed later this month, and will include around two hundred John Doe's. Subpoenas will then be sought to determine the identities of these file-swappers, thereby establishing an official defendant list.
Individuals sued by the MPAA could have to pay damages of $150,000 for each pirated title.
MPAA chief Dan Glickman estimates that movie piracy has cost the industry around $3.5 billion dollars a year. The former MPAA chief, Jack Valenti, had resisted pressure to file these types of lawsuits, but new management feels that this is a necessary step in recouping their losses and discouraging pirating practices.
Determining exactly how much revenue is being lost to movie piracy is a little difficult, but the situation is not nearly as dire compared to the music trading practices the RIAA has been combating. There are a number of differences that makes the MPAA's response just a tad severe.
Movie swapping, although growing in popularity, has not, nor has the potential to become as rampant as music swapping. There are several reasons for this reduced threat level.
Theatrical releases, despite the development of digital projection technology, are still distributed in non-digital film form. The number of individuals dedicated enough to distill a digital copy from a film tape is remarkably slim. Studios have also taken to watermarking their film, and there has been no recorded instance of someone successfully removing the studio's watermark, thereby rendering all digital-copies rendered in this highly-complex fashion traceable.
The music CD format has never, until recently (select titles), included any complex form of encryption or data protection, making it extremely easy for CD owners to transfer their CD based music tracks to their hard drive using various simple encoding techniques.
