What a surprise: Hollywood has a new round of lawsuits against suspected peer-to-peer file swappers trading films and television programs online, seeking up to $150,000 per downloaded/swapped file.
"When rampant online theft occurs, these films become that much harder to finance...we cannot and will not let that happen," said Motion Picture Association of America chief executive Dan Glickman, in a February 23 conference call with reporters announcing the new lawsuits.
The MPAA named only Sideways, the offbeat comedy nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, among the “several” Oscar-nominated films the trade group said had hit the Internet for illegal downloading.
The MPAA didn’t say just how many suits were involved in the newly filed round, or whether the copied films were made by secret videotaping in movie theaters or by copying VHS or DVD editions of the films that were distributed to Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences members for Oscar consideration.
This round of suits came just a few weeks after the MPAA unwrapped litigation against end users—the actual downloaders—of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology favored by a number of P2P networks.
