So far this year, the Motion Picture Association of America has sent nearly 50,000 complaints to ISPs worldwide and anticipates that number will reach 100,000 by the end of 2002

In a never-ending search for con artists, software pirates and digital thieves, U.S. companies with billions of dollars at stake are spending time and resources to curb infringement and catch perpetrators. Their tactics may include scanning the Internet and Web sites for pirated materials, or tracking user registration and behavioral data in search of repeated fraudulent patterns. While SecurityFocus senior threat analyst Ryan Russell told NewsFactor that it is fairly uncommon for companies to maintain in-house investigative units, he believes there are some similarities among organizations that choose to spend money on such efforts. For example, the MPAA is combatting piracy with an automated Web crawler program called Ranger Online, which tracks illegal copies of movies on the Internet. The scanning program, which has been in use since January 2000, searches peer-to-peer networks in English, Korean and Chinese, seeking Hollywood movies made available for download by members of those networks. When the program locates a movie title match, it alerts the investigative unit at the MPAA, which checks to ensure that the file is indeed a copyrighted movie produced by one of its member studios: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Studios and Warner Bros.