The six major Hollywood studios, hoping to gain more control over their technological destiny, have agreed to jointly finance a multimillion-dollar research laboratory to speed the development of new ways to fight movie pirates.

The new nonprofit consortium will be called Motion Picture Laboratories Inc ( MovieLabs) and will be operationnal later this year. MovieLabs will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years.

"We're not going to research how to make certain types of movies; that's not what we're talking about here," said Mr. Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. "Our highest priority is protecting the integrity of our product."

, which led the studios in pushing for MovieLabs, said it would ideally fill in what he said were gaps in research on content protection left by consumer-electronics companies and Silicon Valley. That, in turn, would encourage Hollywood to embrace new ways of delivering movies to consumers - making those new vehicles more marketable.

James N. Gianopulos, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox added "It allows us to develop more ways of getting creative content into the home, to mobile devices, theaters and so forth, without exposing us to more sources of theft. The more comfort you have in the security of the content, the more able you are to expand the consumer's access to it."