vossman77 writes:
No longer is bittorrent the enemy number one, the MPAA is now concerned about for-profit movie download sites.
From the Reuters article:Movie fans downloading free pirated films are no longer Hollywood's worst nightmare, but that's only because of a newer menace: cheap, and equally illegal, subscription services. Foreign, often mob-run, businesses aggregate illegally obtained movies into "cyberlockers" Cyberlocker-based businesses operate from Russia , Ukraine, Colombia, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. Hollywood movies are made available via illegal for-profit sites within days of theatrical release, while the advent of global releasing now allows the proliferation of individual titles into an array of language dubs within the first month of a theatrical debut, he noted. When movies are released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the sites upgrade the quality of video offered from camcorded images to pristine digital copies. "Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites," Huntsberry said. "That's the irony."
For some reason, they also mention that the U.K. needs a DMCA even though the U.K. is not a problem in this case:
In the U.K., we are hamstrung by the fact that we have very weak legislation. However, the U.K. in April adopted the Digital Economy Act that mandates a so-called graduate response to cybertheft, similar to a plan used in France and elsewhere.
Just a though, but maybe, if they offered a low-cost, for-profit, legitimate download site without DRM, they could receive the profits and not the cyberlockers.