The feds are trying to cut off movie piracy at the roots — the recording stage. Earlier this week, they notched their first conviction under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act when a 19-year-old from St. Charles, Mo., pled guilty to using a camcorder to copy The Perfect Man and Bewitched and uploading the copies for online distribution. Curtis Salisbury actually worked for a St. Louis theater and brought accomplices into the projection booth after hours to make the copies. Two of the copies wound up on servers that were part of an undercover federal investigation. He’ll be sentenced early next year by a judge in San Jose, where the servers and investigation known as Operation CopyCat are based. He could be fined up to $250,000 per offense along with up to eight years in prison.
Another eight people were charged this week with bootlegging the latest Star Wars epic and distributing it before the movie’s release. A worker in a postproduction house is pleading guilty to taking a copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith and shared it with friends, one of whom put it online. (I’m trying to figure out why he wasn’t charged with theft.)
Then there’s the SAG member pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of infringing a copyright by giving his award screening copy of Million Dollar Baby to a friend. According to Variety, the copy wound up online and was traced back via the watermark. Like others, Ronald Redding had signed a SAG contract agreeing not to share his screeing copies, making him criminally liable even though he wasn’t a party to the online distribution. The plea bargain recommendation: no more than six months in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. He also faces a civil suit from Warner Bros.
This week’s events were orchestrated to make as loud and wide a splash as possible. The message: no matter how you do it, we can get you. Will it be a deterrent? Did arresting hackers stop hacking?
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