The SOPA anti-piracy bill might be strongly backed by the Hollywood community, but the Consumer Electronics Association – the group behind the annual Consumer Electronics Show – wants no part of it.

In a statement to the House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 3261 – the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (or SOPA) – the organization voiced concerns about the bill, warning of collateral damage to innovation in the electronics field.

"CEA and its members are eager to support legislation that is directed to foreign 'rogue sites' – the 'worst of the worst' – whose infringing activities lie beyond the reach of existing U.S. authority, and have no conceivable justification under U.S. law," the group said. "But as written, H.R. 3261will do little to stop piracy and instead will undermine both bona fide online U.S. businesses, create new private causes of action and weaken the open Internet that encourages free expression."

The group called the definition of theft "extremely overbroad" and said a single copyright complaint from a company can be a "death sentence" to a legitimate business.

"The law would require not just a 'take down' of the controversial product, but a shutdown of all online purchasing and advertising for any other product on the site," the group said. "The plaintiff need only complain that the business is 'marketing' a product for a 'use' that would be copyright infringement.

"This sort of claim has been commonly, and often unsuccessfully, made against innovative and legitimate consumer electronics products. In 2000, such a claim was made by several motion picture studios against Replay TV, an early competitor of TiVo and a forerunner of the DVR products now routinely distributed by cable and satellite companies to their subscribers – based only on the product’s ability to search, record, index, and retrieve content."

The group also said it believes DNS blocking provisions in the bill will hurt legitimate businesses more than pirates, since pirates are able to circumvent those measures.

Four months after Warner Bros. announced that it would delay the release of its films in Hungary due to rampant piracy in that country, officials have raided a substantial piracy operation.

Police have confiscated a number of computers and allegedly pirated content that belonged to the CiNEDUB ring. Included among the haul was a 70 TB hard drive housing 5,000 movies, 4,000 songs, 6,000 games and computer software.

TorrentFreak notes CiNEDUB was one of the higher profile distributors of pirated content. The group had over 10 servers at its base. Two men are currently under arrest with the rest of the outfit still at large.

The MPAA, in a report on the price of movie piracy, noted that Hungary, along with China and Russia, has one of the highest piracy rates in the world. Warner's forced delay window was meant to cut down on people using camcorders to film new releases and release them online or on city streets. The company also issued a ban on midnight screenings.

'Anonymous' may not be quite as anonymous as they believed.

The FBI has arrested 16 people as part of a crackdown on the Internet's best-known hacker group. These come on top of five arrests by British and Dutch police yesterday, which were part of a coordinated effort. 

Agents also reportedly raided 35 other addresses in connection with a series of attacks on companies such as PayPal, which took place last year. (Anonymous targeted the site for its decision to not allow users to make donations to the whistleblower site WikiLeaks

“In retribution for PayPal’s termination of WikiLeaks’ donation account, a group calling itself Anonymous coordinated and executed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal’s computer servers using an open source computer program the group makes available for free download on the Internet,” the US Justice Department said in a statement.

The defendants, who (for the most part) are in their 20s, are charged with various counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer. 

Anonymous' exploits go far beyond PayPal, though. The group has a checkered history with Hollywood as well. Sony has pointed a finger of blame at the group for being at least partially to blame for the theft of personal information in over 100 million user accounts in May.

Prior to that, the group attacked the MPAA and RIAA for actions the trade groups took to squash filesharing Websites, such as “The Pirate Bay”. The Web sites for both organizations suffered some offline time, but the impact was muted.

Anonymous got its start on 4chan, the Internet’s most infamous imageboard, specifically its sometimes gritty "/b/" subforum. The founder of that site, though, says while the site (and the group) have become notorious for their exploits, there's a value in hiding behind that wall of anonymity.

"One of the things that 4Chan does that’s really special is the way people come together to collaborate en masse," said Christopher Poole at South by Southwest this year. "It’s the process at which you arrive at the product that is fascinating. … Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way. … The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself."

Fame in the hacking community is a rare and fleeting thing. Kevin Mitnick found it – and served time for it. And more recently, the decentralized group "Anonymous" has been the reigning top dog.

But in the last month, a new contender for the throne has made a big push – and a lot of entertainment companies have been casualties of this war.

The group calls itself LulzSec. Best known, perhaps, for its Memorial Day weekend takeover of the PBS Websites (where it posted false news stories that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive and living in New Zealand), the group has been craving the spotlight ever since. And it has learned that the quickest way to attract the media's attention (the ultimate sign of fame in the hacker world) is to target media and entertainment outlets.

The group hacked into Sony Pictures in early June, stealing – and posting online – administrative details and personal information for hundreds of people who had entered an online contest via the site.

Yesterday, it announced it had hacked into the servers of Bethesda Softworks, posting another file of information, but opting against posting user information for players of the action/shooter game "Brink".

Today, in what it's calling "Titanic Takedown Tuesday," the group has incapacitated the login sites of the "EVE Online" and "Minecraft" games – as well as the gaming news and opinion site The Escapist.

LulzSec seems to have no political agenda, preferring to picture itself as a band of mischievous troublemakers, but media sites are bracing themselves for attacks and wondering who's next.

Given the group's history, we probably won't have to wait much longer to find out.

E3 is a magnet for celebrities each year. Steven Spielberg regularly shows up. Robin Williams has been seen sneaking into demos. And earlier today, Snoop Dogg was at the YooStar booth to promote the company's latest game – "YooStar on MTV".

Before going out to shill the game, the rapper talked with me about his thoughts on piracy after the Sony data breach earlier this year as well as his favorite games.

On piracy and hackers, Snoop noted that while it was a struggle for any company or artist these days, but said he didn't target his anger at the people stealing products.

"That's what the Internet is for," he noted. "It's full of that kind of s**t. I don't get made at people who take my music. It's my job to be more aware of who I give it to."

He notes that he hasn't even been able to give a copy of his upcoming album to his son, for fear that a friend might burn a copy that could end up online.

When it comes to games, he has been working with YooStar since the release of the console game last year, doing a series of in-game videos. (The title lets Xbox and PlayStation owners digitally insert themselves into famous film scenes.)

At home, though, sports games are more his thing. Lately he's been playing "NBA 2K11," "Madden" (to prepare for the new version) and FIFA. (Snoop Dogg admits to being a huge soccer fan.)

Just days after hacking the PBS servers, the hacker group that calls itself LulzSec says its is turning its attentions to Sony.

The group, which also claims responsibility for an attack on Sony's BMG Website in Japan over a week ago, said via Twitter that it was "working on another Sony operation" – adding "this is the beginning of the end for Sony."

LulzSec caught the public eye with its attack on PBS, going so far as to insert a false news story on the NewsHour website that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive and living in New Zealand.

The group says it has never hacked Sony's gaming servers, choosing instead to focus on the company's music services.

Sony has been the target of several hacks since the theft of personal information from over 100 million PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment user accounts in April. Earlier this month CNET reported a group of hackers was planning another wave of attacks against the company.

Those failed to materialize as threatened, though – something that's significant. Sophisticated hackers, like the ones who performed the first attack on Sony, rarely announce their plans in this fashion. LulzSec, via its boasts, may simply be hoping to achieve a little more notoriety in the hacker community – and may have no plans to attack at all.

Given the group's successful (and repeated) attack on PBS this weekend, though, it's a threat that bears watching.

Roughly a year after Voltage Pictures filed suit against alleged pirates of its Best Picture-winning film "The Hurt Locker," the company has updated the complaint – and it's a whopper.

The suit has grown from the original 5,000 users to a record-breaking 24,583, topping the number of people being sued for illegally downloading "The Expendables".

The additional IP addresses cited by Voltage are split between a number of providers. The studio has reportedly reached agreements with Charter and Verizon to identify individual users, but Comcast (which holds more than half of the addresses) has yet to make a similar agreement.

A full version of the amended complaint is below:

With the shock wearing off after yesterday's announcement about the scope and magnitude of the hacker attack on the PlayStation Network, Sony is now having to deal with the ugly public relations fallout.

Gardner analyst Avivah Litan says the incident is the largest theft of personal information to ever occur. That has spurred politicians in two countries to demand answers. And, as expected, the first of what will likely be several lawsuits has already been filed.

Senator Richard Blumenthal was the first to publicly chastise Sony for the data breach, which saw personal information for more than 70 million subscribers hijacked by hackers. In an open letter to the company, the Connecticut democrat made several demands of the company.

"It is essential that customers be immediately notified about whether and to what extent their personal and financial information has been compromised," he wrote. "Additionally, PlayStation Network users should be provided with financial data security services, including free access to credit reporting services, for two years, the costs of which should be borne by Sony. Affected individuals should also be provided with sufficient insurance to protect them from the possible financial consequences of identity theft."

In Britain, meanwhile, the Information Commissioner's Office says it will determine whether Sony adequately protected customer's credit card information, saying "any business or organization that is processing personal information in the UK must ensure they comply with the law, including the need to keep data secure".

Meanwhile, in the Northern District of California, a lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Kristopher Johns, 36, of Birmingham, Ala., saying Sony did not take " "reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users."

The suit seeks monetary compensation and free credit card monitoring. It is seeking class action status

Sony, for its part, denies that it intentionally withheld the severity of the breach from its customers.

"We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down," the company said in a blog posting. "We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly [Tuesday] afternoon."

BitTorrent isn't usually a service studios want to partner with. The favorite application of movie and software pirates, the service is widely demonized throughout the state of California.

But the makers of The Tunnel will world premier their direct-to-DVD film on the service on May 19  – and they've doing so with the full cooperation of Paramount.

Distracted Media went about fundraising for the film in an unusual way mid-last year, by selling individual frames of the horror film for a dollar each. The plan then, as it was now, was to premier the film via BitTorent for free, while simultaneously releasing it on DVD with Transmission Films and Paramount Home Entertainment Australia. The home video release will include two hours of bonus footage and an alternate ending.

“Our experience with Paramount has been positive, and we’re impressed with how forward-thinking they’ve been on considering our specific project,” producer and editor Enzo Tedeschi told the website TorentFreak. “From day one we’ve maintained that The Tunnel is not supporting or condoning piracy, but instead trying to incorporate a legitimate use of peer-to-peer in our distribution strategy internationally.”

A teaser for the film can be seen below:

The entertainment industry’s war on piracy is well known, but exactly how big an army it has been battling has always been something of a mystery.

MarkMonitor, which protects online brands for its clients, has done some counting, though, and it estimates that Web piracy sites distributing software, films and other products attract roughly 53 billion visits per year.

Of the 43 sites identified in the report (note: PDF), three made up nearly half of the traffic totals: Rapidshare.com, Megavideo.com, and Megaupload.com. Rapidshare, for its part, strongly denied that it was a piracy platform in a statement to CNET, saying it was reserving the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor.

Studios claim to have lost $6.1 billion to video piracy in 2005 – though the Government Accounting Office has raised questions about the reliability of that number, suggesting there is a lack of a systematic means for tracking piracy and questioning the MPAA’s methods. The GAO, however, did not dispute the fact that piracy has a “sizable” impact on the film industry.