Starting January 1, 2000 the Motion Picture Association along with several studios, producers, and film houses, will be shutting off your ability to catch any new movies for the first 66 days of 2000....in this country anyway.

Since about March of this year, anybody with high-speed access has been able to download first run movies copied from screeners, editor floors, and simply theft from taking a video camera into a theater, right from the Internet. Usually movies show up on opening night in newsgroups and on websites. In the case of Star Wars - Episode I, the final release of this movie was passed around the Internet even prior to it's release date in the US. The transport cut (which varies from the US cut by only 2%) includes subtitles, but the movie is still in English. Over 23 people have been arrested by authorities this year, for possession of this copy. The original tape has never been found. It was stolen from an airport baggage check-point at Los Angeles International Airport about 1 week before the movie aired in the US.

Authorities are cracking down, however. Some of the copies of recent hit movies including the new James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, and Sleepy Hollow, have been tagged with identification call signals. These signals report back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation when the movie is viewed, unknown to the person viewing the movie. This technology requires the person viewing the movie to be connected to the Internet, however. New technology is slowly being introduced, but it is still months off, that will enable information to be stored until the next time the person goes online. Information such as their IP address and host name are stored. In cooperation with many National and Regional Internet Service Providers, authorities have been able to track down these movies, and get them off the Internet. "We can't stop it all. If someone wants the movie, they'll find it." says Special Agent Thom Heirs of the FBI Copyright Protection Unit in Washington DC.

So what does this mean to you? No more hit run movies until these "movie thieves" stop stealing your money.