"Dan Glickman, president of the studios' powerful lobby group that has its sights trained on pirates, announced that individual offenders will be identified in the lawsuits the group began filing late last year.

"People who have been stealing our movies believe they are anonymous," Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Glickman said in Los Angeles.

"They are not. For the first time, started (Wednesday) we will be naming these individuals -- wherever you are, you are not anonymous. You can click, but you can't hide," he said.

"These people are Internet thieves and we will not stand by while they steal millions of dollars of copyrighted material with no regard for the law," added Glickman.

Last November, the MPAA announced that it and its members studios were stepping up its fight against piracy and filed a first wave of lawsuits against defendants identified only as "John Doe" in legal documents.

Since then, some of the file-swappers have been contacted and asked to settle with the member companies. Those who chose not to settle are now being named in individual lawsuits filed around the country, Glickman said.

Additionally, the MPAA announced several fresh lawsuits against Internet file swappers on college campuses, which the group said was an emerging problem due to the availability of advanced shared networks.

"Digital file sharing is the way of the future and we want to help educate students about the legal ways to get our products on-line through services like Ruckus and Cdigix, CinemaNow and Movielink," Glickman.

The MPAA claims that the Hollywood movie industry loses up to 3.5 billion dollars annually to movie piracy.

A US government report published last year said that counterfeit and pirated goods, including movie, music and book piracy, cost the American economy 250 billion dollars a year. "