Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Thousands Are Targeted Over 'Hurt Locker' Downloads

The Wall Street Journal reports:
The company that produced "The Hurt Locker" sued thousands of so-far unidentified people it says illegally downloaded the Oscar-winning war movie, in one of the most direct efforts by the movie business to clamp down on the kind of digital piracy that has plagued the recorded-music industry.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by Voltage Pictures LLC, seeks damages and an injunction against 5,000 people it claims used an anonymous file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent to distribute copies of the movie, in some cases months before its release in U.S. theaters.