Responding to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA has posted a list of the most “notorious markets” for pirated digital goods outside of the U.S.
The list includes a number of torrent and warez sites that are well known, as well as file-hosting sites and newsgroups clients.
Bob Pisano, interim CEO and President of the MPAA, submitted the list in response to the Office of the US Trade Representative’s request for a list of “notorious markets” outside of the U.S.
Pisano noted that 46 percent of revenue brought in by MPAA-member companies is from overseas.
“MPAA has a strong interest in the health and sustainability of these international markets and appreciates USTR’s interest in identifying notorious markets that threaten legitimate commerce, impair legitimate markets’ viability and curb U.S. competitiveness and hurt our overall economic strength. It is critical that our trading partners protect and enforce intellectual property rights,” says Pisano.
Result for: mpaa
In September, RealNetworks launched RealDVD, a $30 USD software application that allows users to make a copy of their DVDs and it play it back on their PCs.
By October however, the company had been sued by the MPAA and the Hollywood studios, and the software was taken down pending the verdict of the lawsuit.
Yesterday, lawyers for Real told a federal judge that they did not expect the studios to sue the company, and were somewhat shocked at the speed in which the lawsuit came down. Early in the month, the MPAA filed a new motion, accusing Real of destroying pertinent evidence relevant to the case but Real says they did not hold onto the evidence because they hadn’t expected to be sued.
Making the software legal is the fact that no copy protection is broken during the process, and after being ripped, the image of the DVD still uses CSS encryption as well as another layer of DRM from Real themselves. The MPAA believes the program does break copy protections.
Result for: mpaa
In an attempt to fight movie piracy the UK Film Council has set up a website aimed at helping consumers find legal content. FindAnyFilm.com has a simple form where you can simply enter a movie’s title and find out what formats it’s available in and where.
This is similar to a plan announced last year by the MPAA, although much broader in scope. Besides searching for titles, you can also use the website to locate movie theaters. There are also trailers available to watch.
Peter Buckingham, Head of Distribution and Exhibition at the UK Film Council who pioneered this new site says “This new site is going to transform how consumers find the films they want to watch - we will soon wonder how we ever coped without it! We have turned what was often an incredibly time-consuming, frustrating process into one that makes it much easier for film fans to see films in the UK. FindAnyFilm.com does exactly what it says on the tin and is the fastest place to find a film to watch in any format, if it’s legally available in the UK.”
