ST. LOUIS, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Following the music industry's example, the movie industry has filed lawsuits in St. Louis and elsewhere to crack down on online piracy.
MGM, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures are among the big-name plaintiffs in the suit, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. The legal actions were announced by the Motion Picture Association of America Inc.
"The motion picture industry must pursue legal proceedings against people who are stealing our movies on the Internet," said Dan Glickman, MPAA president. "The future of our industry, and of the hundreds of thousands of jobs it supports, must be protected from this kind of outright theft using all available means."
For now, the defendants in the St. Louis suit are 18 "John Does" -- people known only through the Internet Protocol numbers identifying the computers they allegedly used to download pirated copies of movies.
The MPAA said federal copyright law permits recovery of as much as $30,000 for each movie pirated, and as much as $150,000 if the infringement can be proven to be "willful."
