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Doh! Phone Pirate Could Get Five Years |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Saturday, 18 August 2007 |
The 21 year old Australian man who allegedly uploaded a pirated copy of The
Simpsons Movie he recorded with his mobile phone could face up to five years in
prison.
Unauthorised recording of films in cinemas is increasing in Australia with
police attending seven reported incidents of camcording across three states in
the last six weeks, more than half using mobile phones, says the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT).
AFACT alleges the copy
was the first identified on the Internet by the film's publisher
Twentieth Century Fox within hours of its Australian premiere and before the film had its first screening in the United States. The copy at the centre of the allegations was alegedly uploaded to an unnamed
video streaming
site from a Sydney location within 72 hours of its release, said AFACT in a statement.
Within two hours of being uploaded to the US site the film was spotted and removed, but by then it
had already been accessed more than 3,000 times. One of those subsequent copies found itself
onto a peer-to-peer network and was copied a further 110,000 times.
AFACT investigators also found that the
movie had been re-edited with an unauthorized French language
version,
other copies were reformatted and distributed on numerous Bit Torrent sites by "two
organized
release groups which facilitate file sharing".
AFACT claims the movie was recorded in a cinema in the western suburbs of Sydney on Thursday 26th July.
After "international cooperation" which involved AFACT, Fox and the
Australian Federal Police, a raid was carried out on the home of a
21 year old male alleged to have recorded and uploaded the
original, illegal copy.
"More than 90% of newly released movies that illegally appear on the Internet
and on the streets around the world originate from camcorder copies. This case
shows how fast stolen movies spread across the internet, creating a wild fire of
illegal copies originating from just one unauthorised recording," said Adrianne
Pecotic, Executive Director of AFACT.
"Within 72 hours of making and uploading this unauthorized recording, AFACT had
tracked it to other streaming sites and P2P systems where it had been illegally
downloaded in excess of 110,000 times and in all probability, copied and sold as
a pirate DVD all over the world. The speed and spread of illegal copies across
the global internet as a result of this camcord copy being made from a mobile
phone in a Sydney cinema is staggering," she said.
UPDATE: In the end Jose
Duarte, 23, got off pretty lightly in the courts. He was fined $1000
for recording the new release Simpson's movie on his mobile phone and
uploading it to his own website. His lawyer argued in court that "His
belief was you could upload but nobody could
download".
The Judge said he had "the sophistication of a dead fish", when
it came to uploading the footage on to the internet.
Duarte pleaded guilty to two charges.
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