According to The Australian, ‘The movie industry may consider prosecuting internet users who download pirated copies of Hollywood blockbusters, warning it will take pirates to court if consumers “migrate to illegal downloads en masse”.

The Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (‘AFACT’) is already warning that organised crime is using popular peer-to-peer networks and pirate websites to download illegally copied movies and burn them to DVD, selling them in markets.’

The industry is awaiting a Federal Court judgment in the record labels’ civil copyright violation case against Kazaa. The US Supreme Court found in July that peer-to-peer networks Grokster and StreamCast were liable for copyright infringement.

Ms Pecotic said although most movie piracy still involved DVDs, the internet was beginning to play a bigger role as a direct delivery mechanism and as an intermediate delivery mechanism before the content was burned to DVD.

There are two things worth noting about this announcement. First, it seems to mark a shift away from low-level casual piracy towards identifying and preventing large-scale commercial infringement. To the extent that the film industry has begun to realise that its true threat is commercial bootlegging — not casual internet filesharing — this is a positive development.

Second, and far less reassuringly, the blame is still being laid at the foot of peer-to-peer filesharing networks as though they were what enabled commercial piracy to occur. Empirical studies suggest this view to be somewhat misguided: the products of bootlegging are uploaded to filesharing networks, to be sure, but the converse is not true: most commercial bootleg DVDs are made from source videos other than those obtained via the internet — typically leaked from industry insiders, intercepted during transmission or simply recorded during a screening. They would thus continue to be distributed even without a reliable electronic P2P source.

The movie industry was worried that young people did not understand or appreciate copyright issues.

“When you talk about stealing physical property, we were taught as toddlers not to steal from the supermarket,” Ms Pecotic said.

“When you talk about intellectual property, there’s no moral or legal underpinning.”

The movie makers were mainly concerned about people who “make a business model out crime”, particularly rogue ISPs that turn a blind eye to downloaders, she said.

That’s all well and good, but there is a qualitative difference between youthful ignorance of (and perhaps rebellion against) institutional IP structures and organised black-market film piracy. Further, suing casual downloaders isn’t exactly the kind of action that’s going to instill respect for copyright law in the defendants and their friends.

Hopefully this announcement signals the commencement of a more directed campaign to stem the flow of illegal DVDs and pirated audio discs into Australia — not another antagonistic, inflammatory attack directed at genuine consumers and impecunious teenagers.