Students who download and exchange movies illegally over the Internet may soon face lawsuits and subpoenas similar to those faced by music filesharers.

The Motion Picture Association of America announced yesterday that it will join with 16 member companies and film studios to file lawsuits against Internet users who have traded digital copies of movies online.

Beginning Nov. 16, the MPAA will file a series of civil suits that seek damages and injunctive relief against individual filesharers who have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by downloading and distributing movies illegally over the Internet.

Individual offenders of the DMCA can be sued $30,000 for each film illegally copied or exchanged online and up to $150,000 per film if their offense is proven to have been willful.

The lawsuits come as an expansion of the MPAA’s 30-year campaign against movie piracy, which in recent years has included efforts to educate young Internet users on the ethical implications of online filesharing. The MPAA had previously relied solely on these educational campaigns to deter illegal filesharing, unlike the Recording Industry of America, which has been pursuing legal action since fall 2003. Last month, the RIAA filed over 700 lawsuits against Internet users who illegally download copyrighted music, including one person at Georgetown.

MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman said that the MPAA is filing the lawsuits to uphold the legal rights of filmmakers and safeguard its industry against financial losses.

“We are kind of taking a preemptive action here to enforce our legal rights,” Glickman said in a conference call yesterday following the announcement of the lawsuits at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.

Glickman said that the lawsuits will not specifically target students or any segment of the population, but rather prosecute anyone who has broken the law.

He also said that IP addresses of potential offenders’ computers will be determined in the coming months.

“By making people aware, it is our hope that the amount of activity will end or be significantly reduced,” Glickman said.

Glickman said that he did not want illegal file sharing to affect the movie industry as it had the music industry.

He said that the boom of illicit music filesharing online caused the music industry to suffer from considerable financial losses and possibly limited artistic freedom.

Illegal movie piracy, which includes the illicit distribution and sale of pirated DVDs in the black market but does not take into account files exchanged over the Internet, cost the motion picture industry an estimated $3-4 billion of losses in 2003, according to an industry release.

With the assistance of Internet filesharing, Glickman said, an illegally obtained copy of a movie can proliferate around the world, being translated into several languages within 48 hours of its U.S. theatrical release.

“There is an extensive amount of piracy taking place now,” Glickman said. “Our great fear is . that that kind of behavior might create no kind of incentive to produce movies in the future.”

Glickman said that technological improvements, including the ability to download and swap large files more quickly, may contribute to an increase of Internet movie exchange and piracy. He said that in the past, lengthy download times have deterred Internet users from illicitly downloading films.

The quality of these films has also increased significantly with recent technological developments.

Glickman added that legal alternatives to online filesharing are available, and said that he felt these existing options should be further developed.

“There are legal ways to watch movies on the Internet – it’s not as if that’s not a part of the equation as well,” he said. “We need to continue to develop legal ways to distribute movies on the Internet, and are doing so.”

According to a survey released by the MPAA in summer 2004, about 24 percent of American Internet users have downloaded a movie online, and an estimated total of 2.6 billion motion picture files are copied and exchanged each month.

Students generally use the same free online filesharing programs, including Kazaa, to download movies as they do music.

Many students said that they download music more frequently than they do movies, partly because music files download quicker and occupy less space on the computer hard drive than movies, which are much larger files, do.

“[Movies] never download right,” Adam Aguirre (COL ’06) said. In his experience, he said that movies downloaded on-line are often small and of poor quality.

Aguirre and Kristin Brudy (COL ’06) said that the threat of lawsuits would not deter them from downloading movies.

“I’m more worried about music, because I pirated like 1,200 files on Kazaa,” Brudy said.

Brudy said that she had downloaded far fewer movies, but she would still consider downloading movies online until the cost of DVDs comes down.

Other students, however, expressed reservations about downloading movies in light of the recent announcement of lawsuits.

For Kate Nolan (COL ’06), today’s announcement is another reason to avoid downloading movies online.

“I’m too worried they’re going to catch me,” Nolan said. “I feel that [being charged with illegal movie filesharing] is more plausible; it’s more justified than getting sued over music.”