In response, the entertainment industry has launched a campaign the likes of which CIOs haven't seen since the Business Software Alliance and Software Publishers Association started cracking down on pirated software in the mid-1990s. Collectively, the two groups earned a reputation as "the software police," says Ted Claypoole, an attorney for Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice. "I've been to seminars where representatives have spoken and handed out whistles with their phone numbers on them for people to call and be a whistle-blower. That's what they rely on."

But the entertainment police don't need whistle-blowers. All they have to do is surf the Internet.

Warning Shots

Tom Temple spends his workdays trolling the Internet for free copies of the latest blockbusters. After all, that is what the MPAA pays him to do. "If somebody is using a P2P server or is set up as a P2P server, then we will find it using our search engines," says Temple, director of worldwide Internet enforcement for the MPAA. When he and his team find copyrighted movies online, they mail an infringement notification to the owners of the IP address, warning them of potential liability and ask that the material be removed. When they unearth an operation larger than a single P2P user, they get law enforcement involved.

Colleges - with their high-speed connections and privacy protections - are the bane of Temple's existence. "It's hard for me off the top of my head to think of a university that hasn't gotten a [cease-and-desist] letter from us," he says. It's no wonder then that the MPAA, along with the RIAA, National Music Publishers' Association and Songwriters Guild of America, in October 2002 sent a letter to more than 2,300college and university presidents urging them to prevent copyright infringement by students. The letter asks schools to create rules against sharing copyrighted materials, and to monitor compliance and impose effective remedies against violators.

Later that month, the associations broadened the audience, sending a similar letter to the CEO or president of every company in the Fortune1000. "It appears that many corporate network users are taking advantage of fast Internet connections at work by publicly uploading and downloading infringing files on P2P services and also distributing and storing such files on corporate intranets," the letter says. It goes on to warn executives that this use of networks "subjects your employees and your company to significant legal liability under the federal copyright law."