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To: Dave Swanson who wrote (4395)	5/19/1999 8:59:00 PM
From: bob	Respond to of 18366

Movies Next Net Piracy Threat, Officials Say. by Daniel Frankel May 17, 1999, 3:30 p.m. PT Looks like movie studios are facing a problem their cousins in the music business have become all too familiar with recently: Internet piracy. Motion Picture Association of America officials say that recent, very-poor-quality versions of such films as The Matrix, Shakespeare in Love and 8mm--most likely bootlegged by an amateur sneaking a digital camera into a movie theater, à la Seinfeld--have turned up on the Web ready to be downloaded. And now, with the much ballyhooed release of George Lucas' Star Wars prequel less than 48 hours away, officials are preparing for the worst--perhaps threatened by all those illicit versions of The Phantom Menace trailer that were so pervasive just a few months back. As Lynne Hale, a spokeswoman for Star Wars producer LucasFilm points out, it's up to the MPAA to police such piracy. MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor says the book publishing industry was the first to face the Internet bootlegging threat. Then music, with the much-talked-about MP3 downloadable format. "Now, here comes the beast creeping toward us," he tells the Los Angeles Times, while wondering why anyone would spend hours of downloading time to view a barely watchable reproduction herking and jerking its way across a computer monitor. "I think a lot of it is like 21st century baseball-card trading," Taylor adds. " 'Look, I got Matrix! What do you have?' It's not so much that you watch it, but that you've got it." Interviewed by E! Online, Taylor explains the MPAA has benefitted from solid cooperation by Internet service providers in its quest to find the pirate site operators and take them down. "Whenever we find the site, we find its gateway, contact the ISP, inform them, and they usually help us take it down," he says. As for Phantom Menace, both LucasFilm (which has been confiscating all cameras before Industry screenings) and the MPAA will probably have their search engines working overtime to find pirated copies. Taylor also notes exhibitors have a first line of defense: "We do all we can to keep people from videotaping it in the theaters."