The trade group that represents Hollywood's major motion picture studios is expected to announce Thursday that it intends to file as many as 230 lawsuits in coming weeks against individuals who have illegally shared copyrighted movie files over the Internet, according to two people involved in the proceedings.
It would be the first time that the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios, including Warner Brothers Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, has sued individuals for sharing files, one of the people said. Potential targets of the lawsuits have not received warnings, the people said.
Some studios hope to settle the disputes before they become public. By putting Internet users on notice that they face fines or other stiff penalties for offering movies for others to download, the industry hopes to thwart the same problems that plagued the recording industry three years ago when executives did not respond quickly enough to the threat of piracy.
News source: C|Net News.com
It would be the first time that the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios, including Warner Brothers Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, has sued individuals for sharing files, one of the people said. Potential targets of the lawsuits have not received warnings, the people said.
Some studios hope to settle the disputes before they become public. By putting Internet users on notice that they face fines or other stiff penalties for offering movies for others to download, the industry hopes to thwart the same problems that plagued the recording industry three years ago when executives did not respond quickly enough to the threat of piracy.
News source: C|Net News.com
Cont...
In European terms, this figure is likely to be nudging 1.5 million, while US figures could well be in the same ball-park. To sell over three million copies across the world in its first few days on sale would be a truly unprecedented feat for Rockstar, and probably sets a new benchmark for consumer entertainment launches, never mind videogames, with each copy costing consumers an average of UKP 35.45 (according to ChartTrack data).
In gross revenue terms, the game would have generated around UKP 24 million in the UK alone over the weekend, and projected across the world that figure could be as much as UKP 106 million, or put in international currency terms, $195.5 million or 153.97 Euro. Put in context, if a movie were to gross that much at the box office, it would instantly be classed among the all-time greats - that's how big Rockstar's game has become.
Put into further context, ChartTrack figures reveal that only 10 PS2 titles have sold more in their whole lifetimes - two of those being the previous GTA titles, both of which have sold over one and half million copies each. San Andreas now appears to be on track to top them both and go on to become the fastest million seller ever in the UK.
I garantee they'll all loose this war. Consumers will always have the last say as to how they spend their money. With how crappy hollywood's movies have gotten lately, I wouldn't be surprised if independant film studios could take away a huge percentage of their business by offering their stuff cheap for download on fast servers. I know I'd charge $5 to my credit card for a decent movie that downloaded real fast. I think alot of people are starting not to care if a movie has a famous actor in it or if it has a large special effect budget, because so many of those movies have really sucked lately.
This is definately an interesting time to be alive.
so they are going to make the same mistakes of suing their customer base. those law suits will cost more than they can hope to recover from them.
there is no excuse for this as there is MP3s. ppl say they download MP3s to preview it first, and if they like it, they buy it. People cant say the same with movies.
A) There huge files, and the time taken to d/l a movie you can preview w/ trailers or whatever is not worth it.
B) Rent the tape to see if you like it.
"rampant piracy" as a scapegoat to tell its investors (and more importantly the government) that piracy is the cause of all of its sales slumps.
This is dangerous because sooner or later there will be legislation to mandate DRM which will compromise the digital freedom we now enjoy in the "wild west of the intarweb." What with Attorney General John Asscroft garnering support by equating filesharing with terrorism, this country seems well on its way to a freedomless digital world.
What bothers me is that they Industry is reporting record revenues yet telling people they are losing money due to rampant piracy... these law suits will cost them more money than any P2P file sharer did...
they cant do anything with p2p or illegal
if they close thousands p2p or sharing prgram,millions solutions comes up
soo just forget it
Hollywood going after the downloaders instead of the real pirates who sell illegal copies for profit is like Bush invading Iraq instead of fighting the war on Terror. It is just easier to do.
(Oops, I replied to the wrong person, sorry. This was direct at nX07 instead.)
Last edited by 50670 on 04 Nov 2004 - 23:21
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