Studio howls over protecting content sound familiar.

Sitting at a table for eight in his personal dining room, beneath a vintage poster for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Chief Executive Barry Meyer rails against people who download his studio's movies for free from the Internet.

During a three-course lunch with Alan Horn, president of the studio, he even takes issue with the term "piracy" for fear of ennobling the pests who have devoured much of the music business and are moving to films.

"It's not swashbuckling," Meyer says. "It's theft."

Meyer, 60, and the heads of other big movie studios are eager to define the terms in this fight. Otherwise, they may end up like the record labels--with a generation of kids who think copyrighted music is free if can you find it on the Web.

U.S. movie companies lose $3.5 billion a year to piracy, not including the burgeoning trade on the Internet, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The Encino-based group represents the seven biggest U.S. moviemakers, including Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Co.

DreamWorks SKG's "Shrek 2" opened in theaters on May 19. A copy of the animated motion picture, shot in a theater with a digital camcorder, hit the Web a day later. "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," a Warner Bros. film, turned up on the Internet three days after it premiered in England on May 31. It's gotten so that some theaters equip their staff with night-vision goggles to watch for pirates.

Paul Kocher, a cryptographer from San Francisco who spends half his time in Los Angeles working with the studios, describes a dire ending for his clients. As Internet access gets faster and video compression improves, downloaders may steal a third of the studios' annual revenue--that would be $3.7 billion for Time Warner alone--making many of them unprofitable.

"The movie industry knows this storm is coming," he says.

Encryption specialists like Kocher are just one weapon the studios are marshalling to fend off pirates.

The studios are pushing consumer electronics companies to add security features to DVD recorders and personal computers, they're lobbying in Washington for stricter copyright laws, and they're suing companies that violate a 1998 federal law making it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy systems.

Suits against individuals who download movies may be next, says Jim Gianopulos, cochairman of News Corp.'s Fox Filmed Entertainment. It's a step the Recording Industry Association of America, the record companies' lobbying group, took last year.

Crying wolf

Michael Shamos, an intellectual property lawyer and professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, says the studios are crying wolf to protect the prices they charge for theater admissions and DVD sales.

"Any industry that has gotten fat on monopoly profits can't imagine fighting again," he says.

People will keep going to the movies because they like the communal feeling and the big screen, Shamos says. "Troy" grossed $45.6 million in its first weekend and another $23.8 million in the second although it was available on the Web.

So far, the time it takes to download a movie works in the studios' favor. People often set up their computers to run overnight.

"It's not unusual to wait 16 hours to get a feature film," says Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne LLC, a Los Angeles-based company that tracks movie downloads. "That's not really a consumer experience."

As the Internet gets faster, download times will shorten. Last year, scientists at the Caltech said they had developed a way to retrieve a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds.

And it's not just file-sharing that has the studios rattled. The personal video recorder, of which TiVo Inc.'s system is the best known, records shows onto a computer hard drive. Ron Wheeler, who became Fox's first chief of content protection in 2001, foresees a day when PVRs contain trillions of bytes of storage space. Cable and satellite customers will be tempted to fill up on movies and then cancel their service, he says.

Such concerns are creating a rift with consumer electronics makers, who argue that Hollywood's anti-piracy efforts discourage manufacturers from putting out new products.

And while some independent producers are considering releasing their film simultaneously in theaters and for sale on the Web, studio executives don't much like that prospect, either.

They worry that putting a movie on the Web will anger theater owners and pre-empt the release windows.

History suggests that Hollywood will rant. Then, Paramount Pictures, MGM, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. will partner in something like Movielink LLC, a company they started in 2002 that lets people download new movies onto their computers for $5 and watch them as much as they like for 24 hours.

When the VCR made its debut, outgoing MPAA head Jack Valenti, now 82, said the player and videocassettes would mark the death of American movie making.

"The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone," Valenti, who is retiring as head of the MPAA this year after almost 40 years, said in 1982.

BigChampagne's Garland says studios will fare better than the music business, where people were angry at the labels because they overcharged for CDs and made consumers buy the whole album to get the song they wanted.

DVDs are a better value. They have features you don't get in a theater or on cable, like interviews with the director and outtakes, he says.

Hollywood can't bank on movie lovers' staying put--be it on the sofa watching a $25 DVD or paying $10 to enjoy the latest "Harry Potter" film at the multiplex. With thieves already siphoning off $3.5 billion a year, and the time to retrieve a film from the Web heading toward seconds, the studios must figure out how to make money from downloads themselves or stop the pirates' raids.