(January 25, 2005) — You’re sitting in the movie theater. Watching the myriad of soundtracks and trailers go by before the feature presentation, you idly sit finishing off the remnants of your bag of popcorn. A disclaimer appears with a handful of people in front of a movie set backdrop pleading for the audience to not download and pirate movies off the Internet because they are directly affected. “Wow, I didn’t know that,” you think to yourself. “I didn’t know movies could be downloaded from the Internet.” In all seriousness, DVD burning, copying, and pirating in general is becoming more of a problem.With pirating software such as DVD X-Copy and Clone 2 becoming more advanced, in addition to the security on discs being easily breached, it is no wonder these disclaimers are beginning to pop up. All it takes is a few strokes of the key in a search engine for the proper programs and a bit of an investment in a DVD burner and a few discs in order to one burn any disc with the same digital quality at a fraction of the price. However, the movie industry is trying to undertake the music industry’s safeguard, Digital Rights Protection (DRM), which limits the number of times a user can burn the downloaded content. The same reasoning for downloading and burning movies is the same for the prior dispute over downloading and burning songs. It is sometimes said that record labels and in this case, the big-name movie distributors, directors and actors are already grossly overpaid and charge too much for the latest blockbusters. As long as this mentality continues and as long as newly released movies cost upwards of $30, DVD pirating will continue. According to a survey conducted by the Online Testing eXchange (OTX), an Internet research company, 24 % of the 3,600 users polled in eight countries had downloaded a movie online and 69 % said that they did not believe that online music piracy was a major problem. The respondents claimed that the ease of downloading movies online, the wide variety of them available, and rising movie theater prices were the driving forces behind their actions. Earlier this month, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) launched a plethora of lawsuits against those that advocate the use of downloading programs used for pirating movies, the most popular of these being the Bit-torrent file transfer network, in addition to closing sites such as SuperNova.org, which held the spot as one of the most popular sites for downloading movies. The MPAA has estimated that its industry loses $3 billion in annual revenue due to global piracy and that these numbers are escalating. It seems that despite the movie industry’s best efforts, people will always manage to find a way to pirate movies.