WASHINGTON--Hollywood's lobbyists are readying a new legislative push on Capitol Hill.
On Monday, a lawyer for the Motion Picture Association of America said to expect new bills soon to assail illicit peer-to-peer file trading and curtail the piracy of digital TV broadcasts.
Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's senior vice president for government relations, told an intellectual property conference that his group would, with the help of its powerful congressional allies, attempt a three-pronged approach this fall.
Because Congress only has about five work weeks left before it is scheduled to adjourn for the year, the movie studios' effort has limited hopes of success until 2003. But it will highlight Hollywood's legal attempts to permit the intentional disruption of peer-to-peer networks and limit the unauthorized copying and conversion of digital TV signals.
"This is a legislative objective of ours that I know you will be hearing more about really soon," Attaway told more than 100 congressional aides attending a conference organized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation.
Both are free-market groups generally skeptical of government regulation. They convened for the half-day event, featuring speakers from Microsoft, Eli Lilly, and the Association for Competitive Technology, to argue that intellectual property rights should be defended as fiercely as traditional property rights.
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