Conservatives often accuse Hollywood of failing to pay heed to "family values", but the Motion Picture Ass. of America"s latest initiative is designed to split families right down the middle. The MPAA hopes that new software will encourage parents to turn their children over to the authorities as file-sharing felons.The software, designed to identify potentially infringing material on the home PC, is part of the MPAA"s war on file sharing and will be released for free by the MPAA at a later date.

As expected, the MPAA filed its first John Doe suits against file sharers today.The copyright lobbyists have raised the prospect of snoopware before, and last year disclosed that they had developed two pieces of spyware, one of which invaded the PC and then tagged and destroyed MP3 files.

This threat was more apparent than real, as any such software would be criminal and the RIAA would have faced a barrage of lawsuits. But by hoping that anxious parents will install the software themselves, thus giving consent, the MPAA can get round its most pressing problem: that it doesn"t really know who the infringers are. In every home, the MPAA hopes, is an informer: an anxious parent.The DARE program encourages children to rat out their parents, so the Stalinist precedent has already been set in the United States (perhaps it"s been here since Salem).

This summer, the MPAA was embarrassed after using bogus statistics to exaggerate the level of movie trading on the Internet. Pro-culture group Downhill Battle is fighting back with a campaign to alert kids to the dangers of Willie the Weasel, who represents misleading copyright information being targeted at school children by the BSA and the MPAA.

All about the money, just follow the trail.

parents selling their kids out to pay mikey eisner's $500,000,000 + contract should be jailed after the exorcists get through with them.

No the parents would be selling to line their own pockets.

what kind of reward do they get? i didn't see that. anyhow, hollywood and the music industry need to stop throwing zeroes around. giving prince close to 100 million when he was already over in the early 90's or tom hanks money at all is retarded. people don't think the shit they put out is worth the price, look at your local record store and try to get inspired. i love wal-mart's threats recently to say what they think a cd is worth and pay that and no more. music is like 2% of their sales but they're buy far the biggest music retailer in the country. they don't want to charge over 11 bucks or so for anything, which seems decent. 19 bucks for anything not on sale or newly released is absurd, i only pay it because i get more excited by the krell catalog than hustler.