Andrew Wallenstein is senior editor at paidContent, where he writes about the digital entertainment business out of Los Angeles. He is also a frequent contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered."

If there was ever any doubt that the war on piracy was going to escalate this year, just look at how a new study out last week from research firm MonitorMark was received.

Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the study found that 21 billion of the 53 billion visits per year that come to sites identified as sources of copyright-infringing content were concentrated among just three companies: Rapidshare, Megavideo and MegaUpload. Not long after the Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release hailing the study, Rapidshare threatened to sue MonitorMark for defamation, while MegaUpload dismissed it as "overblown allegations."

The dueling rhetoric underscores the sensitivity over a very distinct shift away from the Bittorrent sites where the rate of piracy has leveled off, to a new breed of file-hosting websites that are seeing explosive growth. That shift has necessitated a redrawing of content owners' battle plans. Here's a look at the likeliest new fronts in the war on piracy in 2011.

The Targeted Sites







File hosting sites come in a few different flavors. There are cyberlockers, which provide cloud-based storage to consumers who pay monthly fees to store what the studios claim is an ungodly trove of copyrighted content. Companies like Rapidshare would beg to differ, depicting themselves as legitimate companies that are working on ridding their sites of what little pirated content they host.

There are also linking sites, which provide users with links to either stream or download content but don't actually host that content. And then there are storefronts, which essentially provide both hosting and linking, sometimes with interfaces so slick they can fool unsuspecting customers into thinking they are legit.

COICA

Long criticized for targeting users instead of the individuals who distribute content, the studios and record companies now want to go after the owners of offending sites. Last November, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which gives the Justice Department the ability to seize the domains of any website trafficking in pirated content.

It remains to be seen whether either the House of Representatives or Senate of the new Congress will deny COICA passage, but if it doesn't, it will grant broad powers to obstruct offending sites. A few industry observers have speculated whether that could even lead to a takedown of YouTube.

Many a legal scholar has pointed out that COICA rests on pretty shaky ground because it imposes prior restraint on free speech — that's a pretty significant Constitutional breach. But even if COICA crumbles on Capitol Hill, there's already been enough law on the books to justify two seizures last year of nearly 100 domains by the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Pirate sites have already demonstrated an ability to open shop overseas outside the jurisdiction of COICA. That may be a short-lived recourse if COICA is signed into effect because copyright owners will likely lobby other countries to model their own laws on it at the next World Trade Organization conference in Geneva.

Google Aid







Many users' piracy experience begins with Google, where a search for a particular film or TV program could lead to a pirate site in just a few clicks. This is why the entertainment industry was heartened by an announcement Google made in December to step up its efforts to curb access to illegal content in a number of ways.

In a post on Google's public policy blog, legal counsel Kent Walker pledged to improve its response to takedown notices regarding suspect content on either Google-owned properties or websites that use its AdSense software. Walker also discussed cleaning up Google searches for content by expunging links associated with pirate sites and boosting the search results of authorized content.

So sweeping are the proposed measures that a skeptic might suggest these are part of a negotiation ploy on Google's part to strike deals to license the content they are aiming to protect; if the ploy fails, these measures may never come to fruition. But if Google follows through, these changes could provide a very effective means of steering consumers to legal content options.

Corporate Pressure

Subscription and advertising fees provide the dual revenue stream that makes businesses like RapidShare so successful. File-sharing sites wouldn't exist without the assistance of payment processors like PayPal and advertisers whose messages often unwittingly appear on its pages. Cyberlockers have enjoyed pretty top-flight advertising support from major brands ranging from KFC to —ironically — Netflix.

The studios are in active dialogue with companies big and small that enable the revenue streams on which cyberlockers subsist. Sometimes it comes down to legal maneuvers. Last year, Disney and Warner Bros. sued a company called Triton Media for facilitating advertising on a group of pirate sites. Advertisers can now provide third-party ad brokers with a list of offending sites where their ads cannot appear.

Defensive Measures







The best way to put the piracy genie back in the bottle is to make sure it never gets out in the first place. Given that movies and TV shows are often leaked even before they make it to theaters or stores, studios watermark prints and pre-release copies that circulate everywhere from composers to special effects producers. In addition, videos are given a unique fingerprint that allows studios to use tools that crawl the Internet and locate the source of the outbreak.

Even once films make it into theaters, there are new ways of playing defense against piracy. There's been some usage of night-vision goggles that allow for the detection of people who dare bring cameras to theaters; the technology hasn't gone mass market yet (though it got some nice exposure on a segment about piracy on 60 Minutes in 2009. There's even development on so-called "cam-jamming" technologies that would use infrared beams to render inoperable the cameras that pirates sneak into theaters. However, this is still in testing phase.

Best Defense = Offense

There are still more measures content owners have at their disposal, though some have cloudy futures given they have shown little in the way of results and are more focused on Bittorrent activity. The U.S. Copyright Group has teamed with producers of a few films including Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker to sue individual Bittorrent users, a maneuver currently mired in endless court proceedings that will only breed resentment among consumers.

But what even the most ardent opponent of copyright infringement will admit is that nothing works better to woo consumers of pirated content than legal alternatives. In that respect, Hollywood has learned from the mistakes of the music industry. Over at Warner Bros., research teams study piracy patterns closely to inform its distribution strategies. And the success of Hulu and Netflix are just two of the ways content companies are trying to fish where the fishes are, so to speak. Nevertheless, digital platforms are still in such a nascent stage that continued experimentation — and all the failure that inevitably comes with it — is the only way forward.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gantico, and Flickr, topherous.