Online piracy frightens movie executives when looking at music industry

In three to five years we could be in exactly the same place as
the music industry," said MPAA Senior Vice President and Director of
Worldwide Anti-Piracy Ken Jacobsen.

To date, the size (huge) and quality
(poor) of most of the pirated movies and television shows available online
have dampened their popularity among casual "peer-to-peer" file swappers.
The same high-speed Internet customer who downloads dozens of
digital-quality songs every hour may have to wait several hours to get one
grainy, cheaply recorded copy of the latest Hollywood
release.

The MPAA conservatively estimates that
there are 400,000 illegal movie downloads occurring every day, a
relatively small number compared to the countless millions of music
downloads. But that will change, movie industry officials contend.
Computers are getting faster, hard drives larger and broadband Internet
connections more ubiquitous. At the same time, television and movie
creators are experimenting with digital filmmaking technologies that could
generate a slew of clean, digital copies early on in production
cycles.

The MPAA acknowledges that their members
have not felt the impact of peer-to-peer piracy the way record companies
have. Movie studios posted record-shattering revenues of $9.5 billion in
2002, the MPAA said, while CD sales dropped from $13.2 billion in 2000 to
$12 billion in 2002, according to the Recording Industry Association of
America.