The film industry lost the plot on piracy a few reels back. Despite more than a decade of foiled anti-piracy solutions based on ever-more-complex systems, the industry trundles on in search of that no-copy Holy Grail. It seems like a classic illustration of that old nugget about "the triumph of hope over experience."

The newest Great Anti-Piracy Hope is digital fingerprinting, and today the New York Times web site files a progress report on current Hollywood efforts to deploy that type of system against Internet file-sharing sites:

Yesterday in Los Angeles, people affiliated with the Motion Picture Association of America talked about the ongoing tests at a day-long anti-piracy workshop that the MPAA co-hosted with the University of California. In his introductory keynote at the event, UCLA professor and Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock showed a single slide that suggested that one of the anti-piracy filtering companies had outperformed the other 11, with the highest number of matches of infringing content and lowest number of false-positives. But professor Kleinrock and MPAA execs declined to name the participating companies or who had scored best on the test, saying that secrecy was a precondition for their participation in the tests...

In the next phase of the ongoing tests, MovieLabs will see if the systems can handle ever larger quantities of copyrighted works. Theoretically, adding more songs, TV shows and movies in their databases could slow down these systems -- and the Internet video sites that use them -- since it could take longer to find possible matches.

Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines here, but it sounds like the digital fingerprinting systems will require technical cooperation -- either voluntary or legally imposed -- from file-sharing sites. Even if that cooperation is forthcoming from wanna-be-rich-so-gotta-be-legit sites like YouTube, or mandated by law, it's unlikely to sway or intimidate the true file-sharing underground. That will likely result in the non-commercial underground becoming more popular -- and over time, more accessible and easier to use.

After all, that is the nature of technology.

Eventually the film industry is going to have to get a grip on the fact that a technology solution to this technology problem is a perpetual, zero-sum game. The link between Hollywood and the hacker and file-sharing communities looks to be enduring, but not in the way the MPAA would like:

"You build it...they'll break it."

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