MPAA steps up efforts to stop online pirates
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Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — As part of an effort to stamp out piracy and avoid the online-trading frenzy that has plagued the music business, the Motion Picture Association of America uses a special search engine to scour the Internet for people who swap digital copyright movies online.
When the association finds someone downloading such movies — which circulate on the same peer-to-peer software networks as MP3 music files — it demands that their Internet service be cut off.
Since 2001, more than 100,000 customers have been ordered to stop their activities through cease-and-desist letters sent from their Internet service providers, the association says.
In a newer initiative this summer, AOL Time Warner's broadband division has begun trying to identify and stop customers who upload huge amounts of data — which in almost all cases means people trading bulky video or music files.
"We are not blocking the use of any applications or access to any Web sites," said Mark Harrad, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "But we are doing various things to manage bandwidth better and to interfere with people who are in violation of (their) service agreements."
He declined to elaborate on interference techniques, but denied the effort was specifically targeted at people swapping music and movie files, saying the issue is bandwidth hogs, not piracy.
Movie files are harder to share over peer-to-peer networks because they are significantly larger than music files.
At more than 600 megabytes, a full length movie can easily take six hours to download over broadband. By contrast, an average music file of six megabytes takes a few minutes.
But Hollywood studios worry that the rising number of broadband connections and improved video-compression techniques will open the door to runaway piracy.
Between 400,000 and 600,000 copies of movies are downloaded illegally each day, according to the consulting firm Viant. Though far fewer than the 3 billion daily music downloads off the now-defunct music-swap site Napster at its peak, it is enough to spook the movie industry.
"Our industry could be damaged as much as the music industry," said Ken Jacobsen, senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy at the MPAA.
