Piracy E-Mailer Incurs 'Hurt Locker' Producer's Wrath

We wrote last week about the mission Voltage Pictures is on to prosecute Bit Torrent users who have illegally downloaded The Hurt Locker. Now there's a strange update to the story.

A reader of BoingBoing named Nicholas sent Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier an e-mail denouncing his company's practice of trying to sue those who downloaded the film. Earlier this year, Chartier's e-mails negatively campaigning against Avatar for the Academy Awards got him barred from the event. While the reader's e-mail is not confrontational, really, he's still on the wrong side of the issue. Contrast that with Chartier, who's in the right, but is astonishingly brash. He's not doing himself or his cause any favors. Here's the exchange:

Click to read more ...

'Hurt Locker' Producers Going After Movie Pirates

The Hurt Locker made the least amount of money at the box office of any Best Picture winner in 50 years, and even then, relatively speaking, The Apartment did much better than its $18 million in the US would indicate. But could some of that revenue have been siphoned by online piracy?

That's what producers of the film are charging, and they're coming after P2P users who downloaded the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Voltage Pictures is partnering with the US Copyright Group, a company that sniffs out "tens of thousands" of BitTorrent users and will be going after them one by one. It's an interesting case study for a couple of reasons. First, as a multiple Oscar winner, it's by far the highest-profile movie yet that USCG has represented. Second, because Hurt Locker was leaked online almost half a year before it arrived in theaters last summer, a by-product of having premiered at film festivals back in 2008 and then showing up in international theaters shortly thereafter.

Click to read more ...

FCC, MPAA Clear Path for New Movies on Your TV

"Selectable output control." That's the key phrase in a new FCC ruling that will allow studios much quicker in-home delivery of their first-run films than ever before. A new antipiracy technology, selectable output control will prevent copying of movies beamed into homes throughout the country, giving distributors the reassurance they need to start the VOD process earlier than the current model.

Bob Pisano of the MPAA heralded the decision as "an important victory for consumers," adding, "and it is a major step forward in the development of new business models by the motion picture industry to respond to growing consumer demand." I fear this is another way studios are seeking to minimize exhibitors nationwide, not so much out of belligerence but out of practicality. The piracy is a big factor, but there's another side to this. After years of conditioning audiences that they had to wait months for DVDs (of VHS, where this really started), the release windows for home video have shrunk and shrunk, and now Alice in Wonderland will be out of theaters completely by the end of May to increase the likelihood of DVD and Blu-ray sales when the title becomes available 88 days after its theatrical release.

Click to read more ...

'Iron Man 2' Leaked Online

It happened last year, and it happened this year. The circumstances are different, but much like summer lead-off hitter X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked online before it was released, Iron Man 2 has now popped up online.

HitFix relays the information that the Marvel movie has become available on Bit Torrent and other peer-to-peer sites on the web. The culprit is notoriously bad policing efforts in foreign countries, which produce a fair amount of all the illegal copies found online. The World Cup is actually one of the reasons Paramount decided to leapfrog the US release overseas, and the studio had to know this would be a likely outcome.

Click to read more ...

Another 'Love Guru' Pirate to Plead Guilty

I can't believe anyone would leak The Love Guru online, and I really can't believe that two people were caught doing it, and one of them has done prison time. It's not that they shouldn't go to jail for it, just that of all the things in the world you could do wrong...these idiots chose to steal a copy/upload one of the worst movies in recent memory.

Mischa Wynhausen will plead guilty in the next few months, according to reports, and he'll serve three years of probation for actually posting the movie online. No jail time, though. However, the source of the leak, Jack Yates, spent six months in the clink for swiping an extra copy of the film from his employer, Los Angeles Duplication and Broadcasting, keeping one for himself. Yates was supposed to provide clips of the movie to The Tonight Show last summer, but apparently made an extra copy of The Love Guru, of all films he probably had access to, to show at a family get-together. Because nothing says warm family memories like movie piracy.

Click to read more ...