Hollywood Studios Band Together Against Movie Pirates

The top six Hollywood movie studios will finance Motion Picture Laboratories Inc., a research operation aimed at thwarting movie piracy. Movie Labs is slated to go online later this year with a reported budget of $30 million to cover the first two years. Anyone who is in or follows the cable industry will recognize the concept as CableLabs revisited; cable companies worldwide fund the R&D consortium. But CableLabs has a broader mandate than the newcomer, which is supposed to focus on piracy for now.

According to the NYT, the first projects include network management technology to detect and prevent illegal file-sharing on campus; traffic analysis to track illegal P2P sharing; ways to provide multi-room access to content without allowing unauthorized access from outside the home network; and geocoding of internet-delivered content.

MPAA chairman Dan Glickman compares it to the Pentagon’s establishment of Darpa. James N. Gianopulos, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, told the Times the research would fill in the gaps left by Silicon Valley and the CE industry: “It allows us to develop more ways of getting creative content into the home, to mobile devices, theaters and so forth, without exposing us to more sources of theft. The more comfort you have in the security of the content, the more able you are to expand the consumer’s access to it.”

Slyck: Co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, whom led the studios in pushing for MovieLabs, James N. Gianopulos, said it would ideally fill in what he said were gaps in research on content protection left by consumer-electronics companies and Silicon Valley. That, in turn, would encourage Hollywood to embrace new ways of delivering movies to consumers – making those new vehicles more marketable.

Rafat: Movielink, anyone? It is funded by all movie studios, and look where it is now…I guess I am not so keen on any more joint efforts by movie studios.

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