SilliconValley.com has a breaking story with inside sources who say the MPAA will follow suit of the music industry and begin a litigation battle with movie pirates. The article says that the MPAA will likely bring suit against about 200 people for distributing illegal copies of digitized movies over file sharing networks obtained by people videotaping the movie inside the theatre or burning a DVD.
Like the recording industry, which began suing individual music file-sharers last year, the movie studios plan an ongoing litigation campaign, the source said.The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major film studios, declined to comment Wednesday. But the organization issued a release saying its chief executive would be making ``a major announcement regarding illegal file sharing of motion pictures on peer-to-peer networks'' early Thursday.
The movie studios were still finalizing how many lawsuits would make up their initial filing, but it would probably be around 200 or so, the source said.
Perhaps it is following the music industries lead because none of the steps taken so far by the movie industry, such as ads and trying to shut down peer to peer networks, has had much of an impact. The article states that the MPAA claims they lose around
The MPAA claims the U.S. movie industry loses more than $3 billion annually in potential global revenue because of physical piracy, or bogus copies of videos and DVDs of its films.The MPAA doesn't give an estimate for how much online piracy costs the industry annually, but claims the health of the industry is at stake as the copying and distribution of movies online continues to grow unabated.
Though I question how the MPAA comes about this price because it is almost impossible to factor in the number of people that only watch the movie because it was free to them, and would not have paid the requisite amount to even rent the video let alone buy it.
There is much discussion on Slashdot under "Your Rights Online: Movie Industry to sue File Sharers" regarding the decision of the MPAA to go after pirates. Including IBitOBear's "jumping on the pendulum" analogy. He states that this motion must go through full swing before we get any relief from it, therefore let' us all jump on it so it happens faster, is less painful and the down swing will happen sooner.
The point here is, that if the MPAA starts suing people, these people may be pirates at some point, but a lot of them are still paying customers, and this type of action will deter people from going to the theaters to watch new movies produced by them. Which is also analogous in the music industry. I suppose that it could swing so far to the other side that it ends up hurting the Movie industry so much that eventually they will start having to back off. But as of now, it seems the 200 lawsuits that may be filed will probably not have this effect.
There are also comments on Slashdot that discuss the pro's of this litigation. This means they may stop going after peer-to-peer networks, allowing legal uses of the networks to be unthreatened. I think this is a very valid point.
Though the comment we can probably all agree on, is that of GuyMannDude who noted that most people don't have much to worry about until the Porn Industry Movie Producers (PIMP) starts coming after people.
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