Hollywood studios have announced a new clampdown on unauthorised movie downloads just days before the Oscars celebrates the movie industry's biggest night of the year.
Ahead of Sunday night's ceremony, the MPAA, the studios' trade body, unveiled plans to slap a third round of lawsuits on unauthorised movie downloaders.
It says at least three nominated films, Sideways, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Spider-Man 2, are being swapped online.
As with previous lawsuits, the MPAA declined to divulge the number of people it was targeting, but claimed the legal action was necessary to safeguard the production of future Hollywood movies.
"This is something we feel we must do. We would much prefer people spending their money enjoying movie content legitimately rather than spending it on lawyers," John Malcolm, the MPAA's director of worldwide anti-piracy operations, said in a conference call.
Mr Malcolm said two previous rounds of lawsuits, which began in November last year and in January, were progressing well, but declined to comment specifically.
Anxious to avoid the crippling effects that unauthorised downloads have on the music industry, Hollywood studios are determined to crack down on what the MPAA president, Dan Glickman, has called "a wave of intellectual piracy that will undermine the very foundations of moviemaking".
Hollywood is taking action against anonymous individuals, whose names will only be made public when the cases come to court.
But the efficacy of the lawsuits remains to be seen. The MPAA was forced to take out individual lawsuits after a US court of appeals judge last August, upheld a previous lower court decision that peer-to-peer networks such as Grokster and eDonkey were not liable if any of their users infringed copyright.
Although the industry went to the supreme court last month in an attempt to overturn the rulings, the MPAA faces an uphill battle to get judges to reverse the so-called Betamax ruling on which the peer-to-peer defence relies.
The 1980s legal benchmark cleared the way for the video recorder, ruling that it had substantial commercial and legal benefits that outweighed concerns that it could also be used to infringe copyright.
The MPAA has recently claimed some success with individual lawsuits. Earlier this month it managed to shut down one site, Loktorrent, forcing owner Edward Webber to pay a $1m fine and turn over all his records.
An investigation by MediaGuardian.co.uk showed that all the Oscar best picture nominees, including Ray, Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator were available to download.
Supernova, the Russian-based site that the MPAA claimed to have taken off air in December, was operating again today.
The music and record industries are also facing a backlash from peer-to-peer network users, who are planning a week of direct action urging people not to go to the cinema or buy any CDs.
Scheduled for the last week in April, the move is designed to send a message to the studios and record labels that are cracking down on online file-sharing.
"The wealthiest, nowadays, decide what we listen to and watch using staggering public relations campaigns; most releases are "format" productions where talent, passion and creativity come after profits and greed," says a message on the organisers' website.
"Most of us feel that they should look into wider availability and more affordable pricing instead of claiming higher moral ground as an excuse to prop up an outdated and failing business model."
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