Taking into account that piracy costs movie studios almost $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year , six major Hollywood studios joined their forces against electronic theft.

Motion Picture Laboratories is in charge with the research for new technologies to stop the unauthorised distribution of films, particularly via the internet.

Movielabs is set to have offices in Los Angeles and a $30m (£16.6m) budget in its first two years.

Walt Disney, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros, Universal and 20th Century Fox hope that their initiative will discourage piracy.

According to Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the venture is "a smart investment", as the non-profit company would "help the entertainment industry adopt new means of fighting piracy and protecting copyrights".


"There are thousands of new concepts floating around the hi-tech community about how to develop tools to fight piracy," he added.

"Researching and developing these technologies now will help save the major studios and other motion picture producers and distributors money in the future", Glickman said.

The projects also mentiones devising ways to jam camcorders being used to record movies in cinemas illegally, and developing methods of detecting illegal content sharing on peer-to-peer networks.