TV-SHOW PIRATES TARGETED WEB SITES ACCUSED OF ILLEGAL SWAPPING.

Byline: Greg Hernandez Staff Writer

The Motion Picture Association of America, already entrenched in several legal battles against online movie piracy, turned its attention to television pirates Thursday.

In a lawsuit, the MPAA accused six BitTorrent Web sites - ShunTV, Zonatracker, Btefnet, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven, and Bragginrights - of illegally swapping copyrighted television shows to more than 100,000 people each day.

``On these sites, anyone in the world can download entire television seasons in a single click,'' said the MPAA president and chief executive officer, Dan Glickman. ``Every television series depends on other markets - syndication, international sales - to earn back the enormous investment required to produce the comedies and dramas we all enjoy, and those markets are substantially hurt when that content is stolen.''

This marks the first time the MPAA, which represents the interests of the major studios, has targeted TV-oriented sites for swapping television shows. The organization has already filed several rounds of lawsuits since last November dealing with the downloading of feature films.

``Litigation is absolutely an appropriate policy for intellectual-property holders to both protect their rights and to create a culture of respect for their rights,'' said Andrew Bridges, litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Winston and Strawn.

``I think enforcement, ... education (and) ... effort to provide consumers satisfactory marketplace options are three prongs of an important strategy in the new world of digital entertainment consumption,'' Bridges added.

Glickman said last month that estimated losses to the movie industry last year reached $3.5 billion from street sales of pirated movies alone. In a study by Informa Media Group, researchers estimate that online file sharing costs an additional $858 million annually.

Under the United States Copyright Act, each violator could be subject to fines of $30,000 to $150,000 per violation for downloading.

Glickman said that the MPAA has been making progress in shutting down many of the BitTorrent sites dedicated to illegal movie swapping and that more than 90 percent of the sites that have been sued have been shut down.

``Since we began shutting these sites down, the time it takes to download a file on BitTorrent has increased exponentially, which means the experience of downloading copyrighted films and TV shows is not what it used to be,'' Glickman said. ``We intend to make it even worse. Protecting the television industry is essential.''

Television shows on DVD have become a large chunk of the home entertainment industry for the studios. The TV-on-DVD category, with up to 400 titles released each year, accounted for about $2.3 billion in sales last year, a jump from $1.4 billion in 2003. Sales figures are projected to increase by about 30 percent each year through 2008, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade association.

``We've gotten so jaded now that we don't even watch the stuff on TV. We just sit around and wait for the DVD version to show up,'' said Ralph Tribbey, editor of The DVD Release Report, an industry newsletter. ``But the downloading seems so illegal. It's not the same as if a consumer tapes a show over the air and burns a DVD for their own use.''

Greg Hernandez, [phone]

greg.hernandez(at)dailynews.com