The six major Hollywood studios have formed a joint venture to research and create technologies to prevent movie piracy, industry officials said Monday.
The nonprofit group will be called Motion Picture Laboratories Inc. and will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years.
Numerous private companies are working on methods to jam camcorders used to illegally tape movies in theaters or prevent consumers from sending copies of DVDs across the Internet.
The new organization will help develop those ideas more quickly to cut the billions of dollars the motion picture industry estimates is lost each year from unauthorized copying.
"Researching and developing these technologies now will help save the major studios and other motion pictures producers and distributors money in the future," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a prepared statement.
