MPAA files new film-swapping suits

Found on CNet on Wednesday, 26 January 2005
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Hollywood studios filed a second round of lawsuits against online movie-swappers on Wednesday, stepping up legal pressure on the file-trading community.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) also made available a new free software tool so parents can scan their computers for file-swapping programs and for movie or music files which may be copyrighted.

"We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have available to encourage people to obey the law," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement.

Parent File Scan also uses a very liberal definition of file-swapping software. In a test on a CNET News.com computer, the software identified Mirc--a client for the Internet Relay Chat network, where files can be swapped, but where tens of thousands of wholly legal conversations happen every day--and Mercora, a streaming Web radio service that uses peer-to-peer technology but does not allow file swapping.

They just won't stop to call P2P "stealing". When you steal something, you take it away and the original owner doesn't have it anymore. P2P is about copying. Another important (and untold) fact is that the majority of downloaded music/video files does not resemble "lost sales". If something is available for free, a lot of people will take a look; people who wouldn't have bought it anyway. What surprises me is, that although the "evil pirates" cripple their business, the music/video industry makes more and more money.