All but lost in the entertainment overload that's crushing Hollywood is an unheralded but multibillion-dollar burden: videogame piracy. The music and movie industries, blindsided by the Web, have been swimming upstream against the digital revolution, suing college students for illegal downloads and fighting tech companies all the way to the Supreme Court, because they believe their business has been hurt by it. But the videogame industry, whose intellectual property is just as valuable, has been comparatively complacent in fighting piracy, despite an estimated $3.5 billion in annual losses worldwide.

Unlike the music and movie industries, which seem all too happy to talk about what they're doing to fight piracy, some major publishers would not comment on the issue. Take Two declined to make any executives available for an interview, while THQ and Electronic Arts referred inquiries to the ESA.

Two people close to the industry, who declined to be identified, said publishers might be complacent because business is good and because piracy is far more prevalent in PC-based games, a declining business, than with consoles. That's because of the difficulty in hacking consoles and the ease of circumventing copy protection on PC games. Another reason publishers might be hesitant to include too much copy protection in games is because adding more code can slow down and affect game play for paying customers.