The Motion Picture Association of America plans to join in the fun the music industry's been having with peer-to-peer online file swappers. The film industry trade group said November 4 that it would begin litigation against online movie swapping.
"Illegal movie trafficking represents the greatest threat to the economic basis of movie-making in its 110-year history," the MPAA's new president, Dan Glickman, said at a Los Angeles press conference announcing the coming assault. "People who have been stealing our movies believe they are anonymous on the Internet, and wouldn't be held responsible for their actions. "They are wrong. We know who they are. And we will go after them, as these suits will prove."
"I couldn't agree more. I'm glad they are," Titan Media attorney Gill Sperlein told AVNOnline.com, when told of the MPAA litigation plans. Titan has mounted a quiet campaign to stop online piracy of its lines of gay Adult entertainment, preferring to work quietly with Internet service providers to get suspect subscribers to cease and desist rather than forcing the ISPs to give up names and locations, as the music business took fire for doing.
"I think [Glickman] hit the nail on the head," Sperlein said. "Aside from the technological reasons why peer to peer has grown so quickly, I think the greatest secondary reason is that people do believe they're anonymous and there's little chance of them getting caught or little chance that they'll be held accountable or prosecuted. And I think those two things combined are extremely dangerous as far as the explosion of online piracy goes."
He said computer piracy is far more damaging than common brick-and-mortar piracy, where someone makes only a handful of physical copies and sells them on the street or at swap meets and flea markets, which he said causes comparatively microscopic damage. "But on a computer spreading it all over the world in a matter of seconds," he said, "it just greatly devalues the great work that moviemakers make."
The MPAA announcement also got a vote of support from the Video Software Dealers Association, whose president Bo Andersen said such online piracy impacts Hollywood and local businesses all around the country.
"VSDA estimates that illegal downloading of movies is currently costing each video store in America, on average, more than $10,000 per year," Andersen said in a statement. "Internet-based theft of movies is more serious than shoplifting, which virtually everyone regards as morally wrong and illegal. Those who flout our nation's laws by engaging in unlawful file-sharing of movies must be held accountable for the harm they inflict."
The MPAA has maintained that Internet and other film piracy costs Hollywood as much as $3 billion a year.
The Cato Institute, the Washington-based libertarian think tank, had an immediate response to the MPAA announcement, saying that American copyright law is a "grand bargain" between creators and public that is difficult to enforce, a difficulty Internet file sharing has amplified dramatically enough.
"The P2P phenomenon represents one of the most remarkable developments of our current technological age," Adam Thierer, Cato's director of telecommunications studies, said in a policy paper ("Tech Knowledge #42: Copyright Enforcement Revisited") issued within hours of the MPAA announcement. "Millions of citizens are able to share massive amounts of content with the rest of the world at the click of a button. Such a revolutionary technology was bound to have a downside. In this case, it was the widespread redistribution of copyrighted materials without compensation.
People who believe in unlimited sharing of copyrighted content must be ready to dispense with copyright law altogether."
Thierer said sharing information and culture is one thing but there are still "good reasons" that some level of copyright protection is vital to preserve and enhance creativity and ingenuity, since people will always create more if they will profit. But that said, Thierer added, the movie industry – and the music industry, by implication – has to understand that you can't prevent all file sharing… and not all file sharing is undesirable.
"There are great benefits that accrue to both users and the industry itself from the limited sharing of content," he said. "Just as a book shared between friends can encourage a reader to purchase more titles by an author, a song or movie shared online can encourage additional purchases.
"But there is a world of difference between sharing a few copies of a song or a movie and uploading entire libraries of albums or movies," Thierer continued. "Someone who shares thousands of works, giving no consideration to the economic well-being of creators, has fundamentally broken their end of the copyright bargain. If they never compensate creators, file sharers should not be surprised when the industry slaps a lawsuit on them."
