News 

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) alleges that the sites, operating out of five US states, claim or imply that their users can download movies legally, whereas in fact they merely connect them to unauthorised peer-to-peer downloads.

The websites listed in the lawsuit include allmoviedownloads.com, flixks.net, freedvddirect.com, mykazaa.com, and unlimiteddownloads.com. The MPAA says that they typically charge a subscription fee of anywhere from $20 for a three month trial to $40 for lifetime membership to download an unlimited number of movies.

The

ADVERTISEMENT

MPAA claims that the major motion picture studios lost $6.1 billion to unauthorised copying, counterfeiting and downloading in 2005, $2.3bn through the Internet. It says that the average movie costs almost $100mn to make and four in every ten made loses money.

This is the fourth round of lawsuits the MPAA has filed against such websites. The first resulted in an injunction closing four sites and awarding damages of $468,000, with the subsequent suits equally successful.

'There are plenty of ways to download movies legally on the Internet,' said Dan Glickman, MPAA chairman and CE. 'Consumers should not be fooled by scam businesses that lure them by claiming to be legal movie download services and then direct them to illegal sites. With these lawsuits we hope to protect consumers and punish those who are profiting off of the hard work of filmmakers all over the world.'

Pro-file sharing site p2pnet said that downloaders are not responsible for loss-making movies: 'Consistently bad and over-hyped movies, not to mention exorbitant cinema entrance fees, are to blame', it said.