A crackdown on the booming trade in bootleg films is being drawn up amid fears of a serious threat to the British film industry, with cheap copies of blockbusters hitting the streets even before they open at cinemas.

Industry watchdogs have already seized three times as many counterfeit DVDs in the past seven months as in the whole of the last year, as pirates cash in on the popularity of the format. Experts say the wide availability of digital technology is making it cheaper and quicker than ever to produce black market copies.

Now a government-backed taskforce on film piracy is to devise new ways of tackling the issue, bringing together key industry players with officials from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

'Because films open earlier in the US than here, you have people copying them illegally there, then within a matter of hours those images could be transferred to a factory in the Far East, be mass produced and on the way to the UK a day later,' said a spokesman for the Film Council, whose board member Nigel Green will chair the taskforce.

MPs tempted to investigate may not have far to look: last week hawkers on London's Westminster Bridge, overlooked by the House of Commons, were selling cut-price copies of Matrix Reloaded - due to be released on DVD in October - and Legally Blonde 2 , not out until November.

While piracy used to be a Hollywood problem, the success of some British films, such as Gosford Park and 28 Days Later, has made them targets for pirates. The taskforce will include US studio representatives as well as the UK film industry, the actors' union Equity and others.

Former Culture Secretary Chris Smith welcomed the move, warning the film industry was facing the same threat as the music industry, which has seen CD sales fall as people download music off the Internet.