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Major U.S. entertainment companies are hiring a former top F.B.I. official and renewing a push for federal legislation to combat online thievery overseas.
By Brooks Barnes
Reporting from Los Angeles
In recent years, Hollywood has become much better at hunting pirates. Just last week, five men were convicted of operating Jetflicks, an illegal streaming site that federal prosecutors said offered a stolen lineup of TV shows and movies that was larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon’s Prime Video.
But thieves are also getting better, moving operations overseas and taking advantage of the rising popularity of streaming to steal more content.
So entertainment companies — already under pressure from Wall Street to improve streaming economics — are intensifying their antipiracy efforts, hiring a former F.B.I. official to lead the drive and renewing a push for federal legislation to combat online thievery overseas. The companies, which include Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, are also expanding their piracy policing to include live sports.
On Monday, the Motion Picture Association, a trade group that represents those companies and others, said it had hired Larissa L. Knapp, a 27-year veteran of the F.B.I., as its top pirate chaser. In her time at the bureau, Ms. Knapp served in senior positions in national security, counterterrorism, intelligence and cybersecurity. She got her start at the F.B.I. as a special agent investigating computer hacking and intellectual property crimes and ultimately became the bureau’s fourth-highest-ranking official and highest-ranking woman.
Her formal title at the Motion Picture Association will be executive vice president and chief of global content protection. Ms. Knapp succeeds Jan van Voorn, a Dutch antipiracy expert who left in March to run IP House, a private-equity-backed start-up that focuses on copyright enforcement.
“Larissa’s relationships in law enforcement will be enormously helpful to us,” Charles H. Rivkin, the Motion Picture Association’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview. He added: “We’re a long way from guys on street corners selling counterfeit DVDs. This is global organized crime. The people stealing our movies and television shows are also involved with sex trafficking, money laundering — all the ills of society.”
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