MPAA Starts Filing Lawsuits Against Movie Traders

[Brian Glass]

I was reading Google's News and came across this link View The Whole Article Here.  They wrote at the beginning of the page:

The Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday that the agency had begun to file suits against suspected file traders.
The MPAA did not disclose how many suits had been filed. The agency also said it had stepped up its public-awareness program, and would soon be providing a software tool to allow consumers to search for movies and peer-to-peer applications that may be residing on their PC.

Notice the last sentence.  What in the world are they are talking about??  I'm sure if a person had the tools to copy/convert and share movies on their computer, they would know about it.  Why would they want to inform the user of these 'illegal' programs??

[Stiffler]

I think that program is for parents to use to see what his/her child is up to. A lot of parents do not know what their kids are up to or even what the names of File Sharing Programs are.

I wonder if that program will run in a *nix environment? Maybe under wine, but if the parents knew how to do that, then they would know how to search for illegal stuff. I want to get that program and play around with it. I wonder if it sends a report to some MPAA server or something. It will probally detect legal video files as illegal like the RIAA Internet scanners do.

[Tyler]

A few thoughts.

1) I bet the program that looks for movies/music/p2p is more of a search tool that looks for known p2p apps and folders with movies and music in them.

2) Of course I bet the MPAA does not make public that they had a record-breaking year in ticket sales and revenue.

3) This is somewhat scary to me.  The movie industry has even more money to bully people around than the music industry.  No one (well a few exceptions billy gates and others) can afford to go to court against such behemouths.

4) Filing lawsuits will only push file-sharing further and further underground.  It will also drive technology forward even more to make it easier and easier to anonymously share files and harder and harder for "authorities" to track what goes where and when.

Just my 2 cents (maybe 2.5)

[bill corcoran]

interestingly enough, i have come across quite a few hacked pcs that were being used to share movies and tv shows.  it seems to be a popular distribution method for file sharing via irc.  maybe this tool from the mpaa can help some poor saps realize that they have been hacked...  and then they too can enjoy the hundreds of simpson episodes already on their hard drive that they didn't even know about.

[Bryan]

Bill do you remember the little all-in-one pos that we had in the CSC that no one paid any attention to?  Until the day we discovered it had been turned into a warez dump and used to distribute widely on the campus network.

[Brad Nunnally]

Something I heard on the news today about this. I was listening to 97.1 FM Talk and they gave their hourly newslines. They mentioned how about 11 people in our area are getting these lawsuits. The only IP they named was charter. The funny thing about it though, atleast in my opinion, is the movies they listed. They said that the people getting sued are being sued for downloading SpiderMan 2, The Last Samuri, and Harry Potter 3. These are some older movies as far as the file sharing time goes. That means they have probaly been doing this for awhile, and this is the first time going puplic. I don't know just something I thought that was interesting and relavent to the topic.


Brad Nunnally

"Wisdom begins in Wonder." Socrates.  

[Tyler]

I think I'm in the minority, but I wait for a movie to get to DVD before downloading it, because then I'll have a good copy to watch. I like to have a good DVD rip to watch (Divx, normally)

This is probably somewhat attributed to the fact that I see movies for free at the theater, however.

Whenever I try to download a movie either before or right when it hits theaters, I end up with crap copies with people coughing and walking through the picture.