Hollywood Legal Threat Leads to Detective Work.

MOTION Picture Association of America; DETECTIVES; CRIMINAL investigation; MOTION picture industry; COPYRIGHT of motion pictures; MOTION pictures

The article presents the author's views about the detective work done in response to a legal threat from Hollywood. A letter from the Motion Picture Association of America (MMPA) led my group to do some technical sleuthing. We got our man, but his fate will be decided by our human resources and legal departments. The MPAA is cracking down on the illegal distribution and downloading of copyright-protected movies. It sent us a form letter stating the date of a suspected infraction, the IP address of the computer involved, the name of the suspicious file and the suspected method of transfer. The MPAA apparently gets this information from third-party companies that comb the Internet looking for downloads of copyright-protected movies. My guess was that a movie file was being offered for download from a computer within our company or that a connection had been detected from our company to a file-sharing server that was being monitored by one of those third parties. In any event, the letter was very compelling, with its pointed references to federal statute, fines and even imprisonment if we did not take reasonable measures to remove the data.