MPAA Worldwide Anti-Piracy Director John G. Malcolm, still chanting his mantra of "you can click but you can't hide" is warning pirates of movie content that they are not anonymous. We read earlier this week that the Motion Picture Association of America had launched a massive number of lawsuits against private citizens in order to try and thwart piracy via P2P networks, now we can read the names of 3 very unlucky individuals.
Last November, the MPAA announced that in conjunction with its members and other film studios, it was expanding its campaign against film piracy. The major movie studios filed lawsuits against individuals as end-users who have illegally downloaded or traded movies via the Internet. Since then, a number of those individuals have been contacted and asked to settle with the member companies. Those who have not settled are being named in individual lawsuits. The civil suits seek damages and injunctive relief. Under the Copyright Act, statutory damages can be as much as $30,000 for each separate motion picture illegally copied or distributed by an individual over the Internet, and as much as $150,000 per motion picture if such infringement is proven to be willful. Criminal penalties carry a sentence of up to five years in prison and up to ten years for repeat offenders. |
You can read the rest of the press release for the mind boggling figures that the industry claims to lose to piracy each year. It's rather difficult to substantiate the claims or even comprehend such large figures, but it gets a lot of attention if little sympathy for the movie moguls. We have to suppose that the three named in the above suit will make some sort of settlement agreement much like this involved the RIAA suits, rather than risk incarceration or huge fines. The difference in the case of the MPAA acton is that they are going after downloaders too, not just the so called "super-nodes" or uploaders from the MP3 days. Pretty scary situation to be in.
Source: Linux Electrons
