Intellectual property protection programmers BayTSP - whose clientele has included adult entertainment over the years - has a deal with two major but unidentified film studios to provide two of its prime services in a bid to help stop peer-to-peer online film file swapping.
Under the deal, the two studios will use BayTSP's MediaEnforcer search system and Customer Information Management System software to monitor for both unreleased film titles and over twenty thousand films from the studios' archives that might turn up around the P2P community.
"Movie studios take piracy seriously and are moving aggressively to protect their most valuable assets," said BayTSP chief executive officer Mark Ishikawa in a statement. "MediaEnforcer in tandem with CIMS streamlines the entire process, allowing companies to deal with hundreds of thousands of infractions with a minimum of staff resources."
BayTSP's programs let content, e-commerce, and software providers and makers monitor Internet sites, FTP sites, P2P networks, IRC chat channels, newsgroups, and even online auction sites for exchange of copyrighted material. From there, companies can request information automatically from Internet service providers where files are hosted, issue complaints based on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and monitor for compliance, BayTSP said.
The company cited one unidentified entertainment industry survey saying Netizens download and swap between 400,000 and 600,000 film files a day, while BayTSP programs, the company added, have tracked about 1.5 million unique copyright infringements and counting.
BayTSP's original intellectual property tracking clientele included a number of adult Internet players, until the company began backing away from all but a very few of those clients in 2001. They also jumped into the fight against child porn, with a number of technological applications aimed at helping identify and stop child porn and assisting law enforcement, parents, libraries, and businesses in doing so.
Ishikawa, in fact, testified to a federal task force in August 2000 on making BayTSP technology available to child porn fighters. "The proliferation of copyright piracy and child pornography are the two greatest threats to the legitimacy of the Internet," he said at the time. "All that remains to win this battle is for strict enforcement of existing laws, making it easier for us to prosecute and win against those who'd exploit children."
