To judge from the early calls I’m getting from reporters, the Motion Picture Association of America is announcing today that they’re going to sue a bunch of folks who are trading movies online. I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously, it’s within the rights of MPAA members to sue people who are giving away their copyrighted works for free, and the MPAA wants to discourage this. At the same time, it’s unclear to me that there’s significant economic harm associated with movie trading online as it exists today — there just isn’t a great volume of such file-trading going on, regardless of how many films are listed on P2P services or BitTorrent tracker sites. (I make an important exception here for pre-release movies; obviously, releasing an unauthorized copy of a film on a file-trading service before it’s released in the theaters poses an economic threat to the film’s marketing.)

When it comes to pre-release availability of copyrighted works, I’m reminded of the now two-decades-old movie “WarGames,” in which Matthew Broderick, playing a computer hacker, dials into a NORAD computer and almost triggers World War Three. His goal — getting access to pre-release versions of computer games.

—–