MPAA August releases
p2pnet.net News:- The movie studios’ John G. Malcolm and his merry band have been busy, this month.
Malcolm, an ex-US Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general, is now gainfully employed by the major movie studios’ MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which has just released a flurry of new ‘gotcha’ fluff titles as part of its ever-popular ‘click’ flics.
The first, on August 25, is, MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY TAKES ACTION AGAINST PEER TO PEER MOVIE THIEVES HANDED OVER BY SEVERAL TORRENT SITES.
In it, Malcolm tells the tale of 286 people it’s victimizing, claiming their names were “given to the MPAA by torrent site operators who were shut down earlier this year”.
This is, not surprisingly, pure MPAA equine excreta. Malcolm wasn’t “given” anything by anyone. Names were coerced and/or culled from logs the studios got their hands on after using their vast financial and political resources to have BT sites such as Lokitorrent shut down.
Following this is the first of an August 26 trilogy, CHICAGO POLICE SHUT DOWN BASEMENT LAB OF LOCAL MOVIE PIRATE starring the Cook County Sheriff’s Department as the local law works for the MPAA, raiding the home of a Chicago man who was, “running a pirate DVD lab” in his basement.
“Police recovered enough computer and copying equipment to produce 140 counterfeit DVDs per hour,” says the MPAA, carefully crafting the basis for an addition to its collection of fanciful statistics.
Recovering “enough computer and copying equipment to produce 140 counterfeit DVDs per hour” does not, of course, mean the man was actually producing 140 counterfeit DVDs per hour. But expect to see lamestream media reports along the lines, “Cook County police have seized computers and equipment in an underground DVD operation. Movie pirates were manufacturing 140 illicit movie industry features an hour.”
ONLINE MOVIE THIEF CHARGED UNDER CALIFORNIA LAW ENTERS GUILTY PLEA, the second in the August 26 series, features Jed Frederick Kolbes as the operator of a “major Internet hub that facilitated copyright theft online”. Kolbes pleads guilty in a case that “marks the first use of California state felony laws to stop online piracy”.
“Kolbes was operating a major peer to peer hub called ‘Smoking House’ which was part of a large network called the ‘Untouchable Network’ or ‘UTB’,” says the promo. The Southern California High Tech Task Force, representing the studios, “coordinated the investigation through the Internet service provider”.
The third reloads the the-realworld.de shutdown in which a German eDonkey2000 TV indexing site is forced offline.
Finally, August 27 saw the release of RECORD $4.6 MILLION EQUIPMENT SEIZURE IN MANILA FROM PIRATE OPTICAL DISC FACTORY.
This drama highlights an August 18 Optical Media Board (OMB) MPA (same as MPAA without the ‘America) bust “with support from police” who “raided an unlicensed replicating facility in the Quezon City area of Metro Manila in the Philippines.
“OMB officials estimated that the operation had produced more than 10 million pirated DVDs, CDs and VCDs over the past year and had been producing pirated optical discs for over four years. The polycarbonate would have produced around five million pirated DVDs and CDs with a street value of $2 million.”
Once again, expect to see reports like, “Huge Philippines piracy bust – underground factory made illegal discs worth $8 million over four years”
Seriously, folks, no one doubts criminal counterfeiters are making a fortune selling fake entertainment and software industry cartel product. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the millions of very ordinary people, not crooks, who share, not sell.
Nor does all the counterfeiting seem to be doing a terrible amount of damage. Last year, the studios alone raked in a staggering $84 billion globally. And as we say in the post which emphasises this figure, “The billions of physical CDs and DVDs flooding retail outlets around the world are so easy to copy that it’s ridiculous. Counterfeiters and duplicators snap them up and hours later, faithful copies, often complete with look-alike packaging, are being peddled on street corners and in flea-markets. DRM? Forget it. The only people ‘copyright protection’ impresses are the mainscream media.
“And despite many examples of creative accounting and imaginative reports, neither the labels nor the studios have ever been able to prove a shared file equals even a single a lost sale. Nonetheless, the cartels continue to claim they and their millionaire stars and support works are suffering terrible financial and personal hardships because of file sharing, which they try to link with ‘piracy,’ as they’ve dubbed the practice of copying and re-selling their product, although there’s nary an ocean in sight.”
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