Film industry files first wave of anti-piracy lawsuits

LOS ANGELES -- Following the lead of record companies who curtailed rampant Internet piracy by targeting even small-time file swappers, Hollywood studios have launched a first wave of lawsuits against people who allegedly downloaded recent films such as "Spider-Man 2" and "Troy."\nThe seven major studios filed the lawsuits for federal copyright infringement on Tuesday in Denver, New York City, San Francisco and St. Louis. Lawsuits may have been filed in other cities, but the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the studios, declined to say how many were filed and where.\n"It's not important," said John Malcolm, senior vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA. "It doesn't matter if it's 10 lawsuits or 500 lawsuits. The idea here is that there is no safe harbor."\nThree lawsuits, obtained by The Associated Press, were filed in federal courts in Denver and St. Louis. Two lawsuits were filed in Denver against 22 defendants, while the one in St. Louis targets 18 individuals.\nThe St. Louis lawsuit is brought against "John Doe" defendants, including four people who are allegedly in possession of one pirated film each. Some of the Internet addresses for the defendants can be traced to high-speed Internet connections made available by Charter Communications, a cable television company based in St. Louis.\nThe defendants are accused of offering the movies over peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.\nLike similar lawsuits filed by the record industry against downloaders of music files, the studios say they will be able to identify the individual defendants later.\nEach of the lawsuits lists only a handful of films allegedly offered for downloading online, including "Troy," from Warner Bros., "Spider-Man 2," from Columbia Pictures and "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen," from The Walt Disney Co.\nThe lawsuits seek injunctions against the defendants. Copyright law also provides for penalties of up to $30,000 for each motion picture traded over the Internet, and up to $150,000 if such infringement is shown to be willful.\nMalcolm said more lawsuits would be filed in additional cities if the current legal action does not stem illegal downloading.\nThe MPAA is running the risk of being seen as too heavy-handed, especially by suing people who have downloaded a single movie, said Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.\n"We don't think for any industry that suing its fans is the best approach to new technologies," Seltzer said.\nAs part of its larger effort to combat piracy, the MPAA also said it would step up its educational campaign and offer a free computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file-sharing programs.\nThe MPAA said the program is expected to be available for download within a week. It has licensed rights to the program, which was first developed in Denmark.\nInformation detected by the file-detection program would not be shared with it or any other body, the MPAA said, but could be used to remove any "infringing movies or music files" and remove file-sharing programs.\nThe trade group said the program would be available for the Windows computer operating system on a special Web site established to educate consumers about copyrights.\nThe program could be a useful tool for parents, especially if they discover from a lawsuit that their child has been downloading pirated movies from the Web, Seltzer said.\nThe trade group said it would also join with the Video Software Dealers Association to place educational materials in more than 10,000 video stores nationwide. The materials will include anti-piracy ads that are also playing in theaters.\nWith increasing success, entertainment companies are taking matters into their own hands to fight back against Internet pirates.\nThe recording industry has successfully seeded hundreds of thousands of degraded, counterfeit copies of music files across popular file-sharing networks to frustrate computer users: These songs, for example, play for a few seconds normally then loop the same lyrics or play static.