BSKYB, the satellite broadcaster, has suspended its film download service amid concerns about a security flaw in the Microsoft software it uses to protect movies from illegal copying.

The emergence of the weakness came at an embarassing time for the software giant, just hours before Apple’s launch of its own film downloading service, and the company is racing to fix the security hole.

Sky, 38 per cent owned by News Corporation, quietly suspended its film downloading service at the end of August, after news of the hack emerged. The broadcaster said it was taking a "precautionary measure" adding: "There is no evidence that any content on Sky by broadband has been misused."

The discovery of security problems is not unusual, and can normally be quickly fixed, but the issue is unsettling for the film industry, which is nervous that its revenues are at risk from the piracy that threatend to destroy the music industry in the first part of the decade.

Trouble began after the emergence of FairUse4WM, a hackers program that strips away Microsoft’s protection on music and films, theoretically allowing users to illegally copy and share music and video files. The software giant issued a patch within three days, but this failed to resolve the problem.

The idea behind the programme is to strip the copy protection, allowing people who have bought music and films, to transfer them onto a music player of their choice — rather than having their content tethered to a narrow set of computers and players.

At present, consumers buying music from a site using Microsoft technology like Napster are not able to transfer that music to an iPod or an MP3 player that does not support Microsoft’s own WMA standard. The advocates of FairUse4M say that their software, gives consumers the freedom to play content where they want.

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