Walt Disney ‘Cars’ scam
p2p news / p2pnet: According to box office receipts reported by Variety, the entertainment industry’s bible on such matters, the Disney/Pixar film ‘Cars’ has recently raked in tens of millions of dollars – US$23.3 million the weekend of June 23 – 25, 2006 and US$34.6 million the week of June 23 – 29, 2006
The most current Movies Top Ten File Share Downloads, Global, Week ending June 15, 2006, compiled by Big Champagne and published on p2pnet, put Cars in its first entry in the list at seventh place, with 1,314,364 reported downloads.
No doubt ticket sales and filesharing numbers have moved up since then as it’s been given a huge merchandising boost with McDonald’s Happy Meals, among others.
This past weekend, July 1-2, saw a huge increase in online reported share/download ratios for the film. A roughly estimated 20K-30K people were online trying to download four specific files which appeared on listing sites July 1.
These files are:
- Cars.Screener.Cd1.avi (540,001,133 Bytes)
- Cars.Screener.Cd2.avi (350,000,578 Bytes)
- Cars.Screener.disney.2006.avi (720,001,881 Bytes)
- Cars *Workprint* 2006 Screener.avi (700,002,267 Bytes)
To the untrained and anxious eye, these file names look genuine, as do their respective, insanely bloated share/download ratios.
But a closer examination into paints a more sinister picture – one that should be publicised and avoided at all turns.
The BitTorrent tracker being used for this scam is http://209.195.58.243:6969/announce
Helped by a few online friends*, and using Torrentspy, trace route programs, and public Whois websites, in just a few minutes it was discovered these files are fakes ‘distributed’ by Disney/Pixar through SmokeBlower Networks, a known spoofing contractor for DRM firm Macrovision.
Ta-daaaaa! Disney, you’ve been nicked, me ol son! In record time, I might add.
Their lame Mickey Mouse attempts to fool people into wasting time and bandwidth have failed miserably.
Again .
With dumpsites, Torrentspy, utorrent, and other sources showing thousands of uploaders and downloaders, any attempt to download these files fails to connect to a single seed, and all downloaders (one can connect to) invariably show 0% downloaded. Unfortunately, the number of downloaders is probably real, but hopefully after this scam is publicised, these numbers will drop drastically.
Apparently, the entertainment cartels still think the majority of filesharers are stupid and will fall for anything.
Wrong. The filesharer is more knowledgeable and sophisticated than they think.
Why should these files be avoided?
Not only for the obvious reasons, but also as a matter of security and privacy.
Recent exposés in major news outlets, as well as here in p2pnet on data mining by governments and corporations, have put red flags all over the internet. It’s been publicly known for years that governments and the entertainment cartels employ (at no cost to themselves) hired, taxpayer-funded international police forces to routinely collect IP addresses of filesharers, with the star-spangled, flag-waving justification of protecting copyrights, as well as fighting terrorism and paedophilia.
Big Champagne is the largest and most respected researcher of filesharing data.
CEO Eric Garland explains what they do:
“We don’t participate in any kind of anti-piracy activity whatsoever. Nor do we try to identify individuals. Big Champagne is purely a measurement firm and as such, we’re concerned only with observing how content on p2p proliferates and is sought over time at a population level for the purposes of market analysis.”
Perhaps BC ought to check their numbers for this past week before they publish. 
The RIAA and MPAA like to use as much fake data as possible to boost their cases in the courts, and brainwash domestic and international police forces into wasting taxpayer money by doing their dirty work.
Manufactured data (not by BC because they only report what they see, but by corporations such as Disney, Pixar, Smokeblower Networks and Macrovision) used to arrest and sue innocent people is evil and diabolical, to say the least.
Besides training and using police who should be protecting citizens from real criminals instead of working for the cartels, the MPAA, RIAA, and their international cronies incorporate in-school programs used to indoctrinate children into spying and ratting on friends and relatives who share files, no matter that no money or services have changed hands, or that nothing has been stolen from anyone.
They’ve even invented a comic book ‘Hero,’ Captain Copyright, and Boy Scout merit badges to teach children to how to report filesharers to police.
No matter that box office receipts and DVD sales increase because of p2p, or the fact that no survey has ever shown that a file shared is equal to a lost sale.
By now the IP strings from the tracker(s) run by Smokeblower Networks will have been added to Peer Guardian and other firewall programs.
Download only from known, trusted trackers and uploaders.
Disney thinks it’s one step ahead of file sharers. In actuality, it’s at least a mile behind.
M-I-CEEEEEEE CU online!
K-E-YYYYYYY Why? Because filesharing is not illegal! (But data mining and suing innocent people is EVIL!)
L-O-L-O-LLLLLLL!
*Thanks to InterRaptor and Wicked.
catflap – p2pnet
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July 3rd, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Do we care ?? only noobs download unverified files and it serves em right if they don do their homework!
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:11 pm
do we care?
yes, we do. we care about privacy, security, exposing data mining scams, truth, integrity…usw.
we were all n00bs once – including you.
n00bs have to learn, and there’s no better place than p2pnet to begin learning the truth.
July 3rd, 2006 at 9:40 pm
oh how politically correct , makes you want to vomit!
July 14th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Thank you so much for the input
July 17th, 2006 at 6:03 am
alot of people who download movies from filesharing network will go out and buy the original or already have it.