The Rise of Digital Pirates Online

March 4 -- This week's Cybershake looks at the threat of digital piracy that faces Hollywood. Plus, analysts say there's more junk e-mail than ever before. What can Internet users do to stem the tide of spam?

Hollywood Ponders the Problem of Piracy

The record industry fought hard to shut down Web sites such as Napster where online members traded in illegally copied digital music files. But the damage may already have been done. "The music industry was affected by the whole Napster trading and for the first time in a decade CD sales declined last year," says Anita Hamilton of Time magazine.

And that harsh lesson is something the movie and TV industry is taking to heart.

The amount of pirated movies traded online isn't anywhere close to the millions of music files that were traded during the salad days of Napster. That's because only Internet users with the fastest of connection can handle the huge sizes of digital video files. But that hasn't stopped some from trying to establish video trading outposts.

For example, there was a site in Taiwan called Movie88.com that let people view movies on line for $1 per movie says Hamilton. "You could watch all sorts of movies, thousands of movies, current movies," she says.

Authorities have shut down the Web site. But Hollywood is far from safe.

"There are a lot of sites [and] programs on line that let you trade TV shows," says Hamilton. And devices like ReplayTV — a digital VCR that records shows on a hard drive — may make it even harder for movie studios to thwart potential pirates.

"In the new version — the ReplayTV 4000 — it gives you a feature where you can send [recorded shows] to a friend," says Hamilton. "The friend must have a ReplayTV [too], but there's no requirement that they have to subscribe say, to HBO. So you could send them an HBO show and they'd get HBO for free."

But Hollywood may soon get a big helping hand in fighting the threat of digital pirates.

Last week, the U.S. government held hearings with Hollywood and high-tech company execs in order to figure out some method of stopping digital piracy. Senators hope that the entertainment and computer camps can work out something soon. But as both sides continued to bicker over what should — or could — be done, some legislators believe a government-mandated solution may be the only recourse.