The Campusist web site offers up that key component of collegiate life: cheap movies. Well, free movies, in this case, all of them offsite links to obviously illegal copies of popular films. According to Quantcast, an Internet measurement firm, people don't end up at the site by accident; the most popular keyword searches from those who visit Campusist are "watch movies online free," "free movie downloads," "free movies," "free online movies," etc.

And it's not even moderately difficult to access them, like it used to be in the primitive P2P days. Now, camcorded films like Twilight are offered up in Flash by sites that splay advertisements across the screen and pop them up repeatedly along the bottom of the video in question. Even those who don't see anything wrong with "noncommercial" sharing between a couple of thousand friends can't see such solutions as anything other than piracy.

But the key question is whether sites like Campusist are engaged in that piracy, or whether the fact that they simply link to other sites grants them immunity. This latter argument is the one routinely advanced by The Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers. But, when every link on a site leads to an infringing copy of a film, does the "Hey, I'm just linking to some stuff!" argument still carry weight?

The MPAA doesn't think so, and yesterday it filed suits against three websites: Campusist, Movies-on-demand.tv, and Sswarez.com. The move is part of MPAA's continuing legal campaign to target distribution sites, and the film business has yet to engage in the sort of widespread suing of individuals that has characterized the music industry's approach.

Hollywood can at least take cold comfort in the fact that its product is popular—so popular, in fact, that China's official news agency picked up the lawsuit news immediately, and it's also of interest to Russians.

Further reading: