TorrentFreak

The MPAA leaves no opportunity unused to make sure that people understand how dangerous movie piracy is. Despite breaking records at the box office year after year, piracy is costing the U.S. economy several billion dollars. At least that’s what the MPAA claims. But the piracy ‘threat’ is not limited to the economy. It also [...]

Earlier this year, member companies of the MPAA filed a lawsuit against the Hotfile file-hosting service and ever since the parties have been back and forth submitting and responding to court papers. Now it seems that the MPAA want Hotfile to hand over just about every piece of data the company holds, from the IP addresses of uploaders and downloaders to the company’s source code.

A partnership between the RIAA, MPAA and the major ISPs, which would see the latter taking action against infringing customers, has been confirmed. If final agreement is reached – a point believed to be as close as next month – ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon will begin taking increasingly severe measures against pirating customers.

According to a disclosure report, the MPAA spent $400,000 lobbying a wide range of US government departments in the first quarter of 2011 including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Vice President’s Office. Issues on the table include so-called “rogue sites” including RapidShare, streaming, graduated response (3 strikes) and domain seizures.

The bizarre-yet-brilliant streaming movie service Zediva recently punched a hole straight through the MPAA’s restrictive licensing roadblocks. Now the fledgling outfit is facing the legal might of Hollywood who want to bomb it back to the Stone Age. Perhaps surprisingly, Zedivca aren’t rolling over and have instead compiled a dream team of lawyers to fight back.

Last year the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt filed an appeal in their case with the MPAA. With the appeal isoHunt hopes to overturn a District Court ruling that obligates the site to operate an MPAA-approved censorship filter. The case is still ongoing and the Appeal Court has now granted Google the opportunity to chime in as well, leading to critical comments from both the MPAA and isoHunt.

MPAA Vice President Greg Frazier has made some interesting comments on copyright and widespread Internet piracy during a lobbying visit to Brazil. Among other things, Frazier told a local newspaper that democratizing culture is not in the interests of the MPAA. As it turns out, the MPAA’s definition of creativity and culture is a rather narrow one that is quite different from that of the general public.