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Greg Goeckner sounds almost wistful in describing the old days of movie piracy. When he became an in-house lawyer at the Motion Picture Association of America in 1994, the threat was from bootleg videocassettes. "We would have investigators go into stores and pick them up," says Goeckner, who became the MPAA's general counsel this past February. "It was easy and tangible."

Now his job is a lot more complicated. The Internet offers one-stop shopping for those wishing to filch from an ever-expanding menu of pirated movies and television shows. So the MPAA (which represents the six biggest production companies in the industry) calls in the lawyers. In June and July it sued three Web sites that, according to Goeckner, pose a new threat: They allow users to stream copyrighted video without permission.

Goeckner recently spoke from his Los Angeles office with Corporate Counsel senior reporter David Hechler about the MPAA's litigation strategy. An edited version of his remarks follows.

Q: The MPAA has previously sued other Web sites for copyright infringement -- Grokster, Streamcast, and, more recently, Torrentspy.com. What's different about the targets of your latest suits -- Peekvid.com, YouTVpc.com and ShowStash.com?

A: It's really just a different style of helping people pirate. Because they organize links to content that's posted elsewhere, they really are pointing people to the content and telling them, "Go here and you can get it for free." It's just technologically a little different by comparison to sites like Grokster, which enabled peer-to-peer file sharing.

Q: Are these new sites a greater threat because they offer streaming video?

A: We get principles established for one type of threat, and people come up with new ways of pirating. This is not something we saw five years ago. We've been fairly effective in at least controlling the peer-to-peer piracy. But this is a new phenomenon.

Q: Can lawsuits really have an impact? Some say that while you're whacking one source of piracy, three more spring up to take its place.

A: Right. But you can't sue everybody. Often lawsuits are intended to establish a principle, and in a lot of cases people are law-abiding. They will follow the decisions of the courts. Sometimes you have to keep taking actions because there's too much profit in piracy.

Q: What's next? Will you sue Internet service providers for aiding and abetting -- for allowing these Web sites to exist?

A: We have been discussing and working with ISPs on ways in which we can cooperate to limit the level of piracy on the Internet. Things like graduated response -- trying to get them to take action against their subscribers who engage in piracy, and especially people who are caught repeatedly doing it. And obviously, if we could get them to filter infringing content on their networks, I think that would be a great step forward.

Q: Are you hopeful that the ISPs will be able to filter in the way you're looking for?

A: We think there's a lot of promise to filtering technologies. There was a recent case in Europe where a court actually ordered an ISP to filter [SABAM v. Tiscali (now known as Scarlet), decided by the Court of First Instance in Brussels].

Q: That's essentially what Viacom Inc. is asking YouTube Inc., to do -- filter out infringing material. (In a suit filed in March, Viacom claims that its copyrighted content is being posted illegally on YouTube.) Will the MPAA back that action?

A: We're obviously monitoring the litigation. I can't really say anything more than that about it.

Q: The MPAA hasn't filed nearly as many infringement suits as the Recording Industry Association of America, which has also sued consumers much more often than your group. Why the difference?

A: Some of this relates to technical aspects. Consider, for example, the [smaller] file size of a song, as opposed to the [much larger] file size of a motion picture. That meant that there was a lot more online piracy of music early on than there was of motion pictures, which led to different approaches.

Q: Will the MPAA have to adjust its strategy again as technology advances and it becomes even easier for individuals to download and view pirated movies?

A: One of the things you've seen over the last couple of years is the dramatic expansion of broadband both here and in other countries, and we have seen a lot more online piracy of movies and television. I've been here nearly 14 years, and we've seen a dramatic increase in the litigation that the industry has taken to protect itself. The specific style in which [the infringers] are pirating or helping others pirate is a little different, but it really is part of a continuum.

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