LOS ANGELES, Jan. 27 (Xinhuanet) -- Major Hollywood studios and other independent film distributors have unleashed a second wave of copyright lawsuits as the industry continues to fight piracy on P2P networks, the Hollywood Reporter reported Thursday.

    This was announced by Dan Glickman, president of Mition PictureAssociation of America (MPAA) which represents seven major Hollywood studios, the report said.

    However, it did not reveal any details on the new lawsuits as to who are sued and how many of them.

    Meanwhile, Glickman announced the availability of a software called Parent File Scan, which helps consumers check whether theircomputers have peer-to-peer software and potentially infringing copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted material.

    Removing such material can help consumers avoid problems frequently caused by peer-to-peer software. The information generated by the software is made available only to the program's user and is not shared with or reported to the MPAA or any other body. It is available through links found at www.respect copyrights.org as well as the MPAA's www.mpaa.org.

    "We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have availableto encourage people to obey the law," Glickman said.

    "We had to resort to lawsuits as one option to help make that happen, but at the same time, we are making a new tool, Parent File Scan, widely available to parents and other consumers," he added.

    The MPAA member studios filed the first round of lawsuits against individual file traders in November. As those lawsuits proceed, many of the defendants are seeking to settle the claims against them rather than to litigate.

    Last month, the MPAA filed suits and other legal actions in theUnited States and overseas against dozens of operators of servers that function as the "traffic monitors" for material swapped on the latest generation of peer-to-peer services, including BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey.

    Many of those servers have since been shut down, and the illegal distribution of motion pictures over those networks has dropped. Enditem