LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- There are more Hollywood blockbusters available these days on the Internet for downloading than last year, when a campaign was launched to fight pre-Oscar piracy, a report said Thursday.

    As the night when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its new Oscar winners draws near, the problem of movie leakages through the Internet has become significantly worse, partly due to the introduction of DVD screeners.

    All five films nominated for the best Academy Award picture have been found on the Net and the FBI is investigating several cases including the leaking of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby", a popular Oscar contender, and other hopefuls, according tothe Los Angeles Times report.

    Studios routinely send screeners, or sample movies, to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other guilds to publicize their Oscar hopefuls during the awards season,which begins in November.

    And because the screeners are DVDs this season, not VHS videos as they were before, the quality of the copies is much better.

    Sources said that some studios opted not to send out release forms requiring academy members' pledge not to share their screeners with other people due to fears of unpopular reactions, and they didn't present a unified front on watermarking, a kind of

    fingerprint technology that helps track each screener.

    The watermark technology did help authorities last year catch an academy member who lent his screeners to a friend, leading the leakage of the films. The reckless member was expelled from the academy later and ordered to pay Sony and Warner Brothers. more than 600,000 dollars in damages.

    Although screeners abuse represents a relatively small share ofthe movie piracy problems, studios executives are eager to protectthem because the piracy on the Internet is closely linked to illegal sales on the streets, the report said.

    Illegal movie discs, which cost the film industry 3.5 billion dollars last year, mostly come from bootlegs secretly taped in theaters with camcorders. But now DVD bootleggers could download master copies from the Net with top-quality picture and sound evenmonths before the films are publicly released.

    Cinea Inc., a division of Dolby Laboratories Inc., said last year it developed a new player and disc system that could make copying difficult and easier to detect. The company had offered tosend such players to every Academy member free of charge.

    However, production delays prevented the company from making delivery until mid-December, a month after the studios started releasing screeners. Enditem