Movie Chief: Pre-Release Piracy Makes No Impact on Box Office

[Hairbautt]

"The last time a workprint copy of a high profile movie hit the web, a BitTorrent site got shutdown by the FBI and several people went to jail. A US citizen caught seeding a pre-release movie faces 5 years in jail..."

The above reference was from Operation D-Elite where it is believed that the pre-release of the new Star Wars movie set off the raids leading to "the subsequent jailing of several people including Scott McCausland, Grant Stanley, Sam Kuonen and Scott D. Harvanek..."

Currently, Lions Gate Entertainment faces 'workprint copies'--described as "a rough, unfinished form"--of its new horror film, Hostel: Part II. Tom Ortenberg, the Lions Gate President, commented that the pre-release is "...distressing and disappointing...but it will have no meaningful impact on the box office."

"…yet in the US, you can get 5 years in jail for it." Of course.

Source: TorrentFreak

[mbucari1]

Another of the many reasons I'm ditching this country.

[tree_for]

it sucked anywayz..... real bad....

[WHRST]

it sucked anywayz..... real bad....

[Skerven]

Another of the many reasons I'm ditching this country.

I might do the same, if I get a chance. I don't want to leave family behind though .

But yeah behind the American government are two incentives: dogma and money. Why don't people realize this? Maybe they do, but have their own incentives for not doing anything about it.

This reminds me of a quote from Eric Fromm from his Afterword of 1984 (in the millennium edition) that talks about doublethink in the modern era. In fact I have the book right here on my desk:

"Another important point in Orwell's discussion is closely related to 'doublethink,' namely that in a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, for instance, if he has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experiences himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or "Slavery is Freedom," and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Specifically this applies to ideologies. Just as the Inquisitors who tortured their prisoners believed that they acted in the name of Christian love, the Party 'rejects and vilifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism.' Its content is reversed into its opposite, and yet people believe that the ideology means what it says. In this respect Orwell quite obviously refers to the falsification of socialism by Russian communism, but it must be added that the West is also guilty of a similar falsification. We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, and motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns. ... The reader will find many other features of our present Western society in Orwell's description in 1984, provided he can overcome enough of his own 'doublethink.'"

I just had to write the entire paragraph... the lines in bold are what directly relate to my point.