Oscar ballots in the mail
p2pnet.net News:- The 5,808 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will get 267 feature movies to sort through for the 2004 Best Picture, and the Oscar nomination ballots have been mailed out.
It might have been 5,809 had not former member Carmine Caridi been nailed for giving copies of two of last year’s contenders, The Last Samurai and Mystic River, to Russell Sprague, 51, who then loaded them on the p2p nets.
For his troubles, Caridi, Vince Gotelli in several NYPD episodes, was kicked out of the ‘academy’ and ordered to pay Warner Bros a total of $300,000.
Screeners are copies of movies sent Academy members who collectively decide who’s going to get an Oscar, and who isn’t, and to media reps, and so on.
Ex-MPAA boss Jack Valenti put screeners on the map when he tried to have them banned on the grounds they were appearing online.
He failed miserably – various vested interests saw to that – and Dan Glickman, who recently took over from Valenti, has been spending all his time trying to convince the world that the studios, which are reporting staggering profits, are justified in launching lawsuits against file sharers who, he says, are wreaking havoc with industry revenues.
Glickman hasn’t said anything about the AT&T Labs report which pointed out that of a total of 285 movies sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders, or that Mel Gibson sued a Hollywood post-production company after three employees copied his The Passion of Christ.
Watch this space …..
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See:-
nailed – NYPD Blue actor p2p pirate?, p2pnet, November 24, 2004
wreaking havoc – MPAA goes after BitTorrent, p2pnet, December 14, 2004
