Last week The Expendables 3 leaked online and thousands shared it illegally. While most sat in the shadows, David Pierce, an editor at The Verge, admitted to engaging in what amounts to the criminal distribution of an unreleased copyright work. Is it now OK to confess to jailable offenses as long as they're piracy-related?

piracy-crimeLast week’s leak of The Expendables 3 was a pretty big event in the piracy calendar and as TF explained to inquiring reporters, that is only achieved by getting the right mix of ingredients.

First and foremost, the movie was completely unreleased meaning that private screenings aside, it had never hit a theater anywhere in the world. Getting a copy of a movie at this stage is very rare indeed. Secondly, the quality of the leaked DVD was very good indeed.

Third, and we touched on this earlier, are the risks involved in becoming part of the online distribution mechanism for something like this. Potentially unfinished copies of yet-to-be-released flicks can be a very serious matter indeed, with custodial sentences available to the authorities.

And yet this week, David Pierce, Assistant Managing Editor at The Verge, wrote an article in which he admitted torrenting The Expendables 3 via The Pirate Bay.




“The Expendables 3 comes out August 15th in thousands of theaters across America. I watched it Friday afternoon on my MacBook Air on a packed train from New York City to middle-of-nowhere Connecticut. I watched it again on the ride back. And I’m already counting down the days until I can see it in IMAX,” he wrote.

Pierce’s article, and it’s a decent read, talks about how the movie really needs to be seen on the big screen. It’s a journey into why piracy can act as promotion and how the small screen experience rarely compensates for seeing this kind of movie in the “big show” setting.

Pierce is a great salesman and makes a good case but that doesn’t alter the fact that he just admitted to committing what the authorities see as a pretty serious crime.

The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 refers to it as “the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.”

The term “making it available” refers to uploading and although one would like to think that punishments would be reserved only for initial leakers (if anyone), the legislation fails to specify. It seems that merely downloading and sharing the movie using BitTorrent could be enough to render a user criminally liable, as this CNET article from 2005 explains.

FECA

So with the risks as they are, why would Pierce put his neck on the line?

Obviously, he wanted to draw attention to the “big screen” points mentioned above and also appreciates plenty of readers. It’s also possible he just wasn’t aware of the significance of the offense. Sadly, our email to Pierce earlier in the week went unanswered so we can’t say for sure.

But here’s the thing.

There can be few people in the public eye, journalists included, who would admit to stealing clothes from a Paris fashion show in order to promote Versace’s consumer lines when they come out next season.

steal-carAnd if we wrote a piece about how we liberated a Honda Type R prototype from the Geneva Motor Show in order to boost sales ahead of its consumer release next year, we’d be decried as Grand Theft Auto’ists in need of discipline.

What this seems to show is that in spite of a decade-and-a-half’s worth of “piracy is theft” propaganda, educated and eloquent people such as David Pierce still believe that it is not, to the point where pretty serious IP crimes can be confessed to in public.

At the very least, the general perception is that torrenting The Expendables 3 is morally detached from picking up someone’s real-life property and heading for the hills. And none of us would admit to the latter, would we?

Hollywood and the record labels will be furious that this mentality persists after years of promoting the term “intellectual property” and while Lionsgate appear to have picked their initial targets (and the FBI will go after the initial leakers), the reality is that despite the potential for years in jail, it’s extremely unlikely the feds will be turning up at the offices of The Verge to collar Pierce. Nor will they knock on the doors of an estimated two million other Expendables pirates either.

And everyone knows it.

As a result, what we have here is a crazy confession brave article from Pierce which underlines that good movies are meant to be seen properly and that people who pirate do go on to become customers if the product is right. And, furthermore, those customers promote that content to their peers, such as the guy on the train who looked over Pierce’s shoulder when he was viewing his pirate booty.

“He won’t be the last person I tell to go see The Expendables 3 when it hits theaters in August,” Pierce wrote. “And I’ll be there with them, opening night. I know the setlist now, I know all the songs by heart, but I still want to see the show.”

Pierce’s initial piracy was illegal, no doubt, but when all is said and done (especially considering his intent to promote and invest in the movie) it hardly feels worthy of a stay in the slammer. I venture that the majority would agree – and so the cycle continues.


source: http://torrentfreak.com/can-we-publicly-confess-to-online-piracy-crimes-140803/

 

I Dunno, the day I torrent a movie, watch it, then go pay to watch it again amongst a bunch of screaming, texting, coughing retards and crying babies. I may be close to my end. *yes*

I just don't buy (pun intended) the whole piracy is good for business idea.

 

It might be good for word of mouth but I think the majority of people are not internet savvy to the point where they know how to DL and watch a movie, and if they got a movie, they'd have no clue of how to be able to watch it on a TV. So the minority that DL might recommend the flick to the rest.

 

too me... a movie like that is worthless... just standard american, cookie-cutter, profit-not art, kinda' film (and it doesn;t even deserve to be considered film... that word denotes art as far as I'm concerned)..

however, yes, if a gun was held to my head and I had to watch it, I would probably enjoy the explosions and hot-chicks... but still, there is only so much time on this earth, and not enough time to all of it... so i try to spend it wisely.

p.s. i could very well be an american, so don't be offended.

and... I'm with clamz and One Reason.

 

In terms of movies and music piracy is good for business. That was put to rest a long time ago when impartial studies were done that showed that yes it actually does generate revenue and lots of it. However in the software realm it is a different story but it all depends on a lot of factors.

 

I'm pretty sure the filmmakers' income from all the free promotion via Internet leaks and torrented low-quality telesyncs outnumber their financial loss due to illegally shared material by far. And in my humble opinion, even streaming or downloading movies isn't the same as stealing a car, sorry. Stealing an object with a limited quantity isn't the same as downloading a digital product that can be copied an infinite amount of times for free. Plus, a lot of the people that watch streams on the internet or download movies probably wouldn't have bought the DVD anyway.

 

Piracy is good AND bad at the same time.

Some ppl will watch a film by curiosity...and never go to theater because it is enough for them, film being good or bad.
If there was NO leak, no one could see it by internet.
And so SOME of them would have gone to theater, by curiosity again.

With piracy :
On one side, you attract ppl by creating two stages of consumer will.
On the other side, you loose some money from ppl who don't feel any need to watch in theater once they seen it by download.

Like Catalyst said, it is totally different in audio world. And scale is totally different (compare millions to thousands ppl). Childs don't care about Protools 11 or Nexus 2

 

Studies.. pfft.. *no*

It's laid to rest if u believe everything u read.

 

So what do you believe in One Reason? Do you believe in simple numbers and facts?
Warez has been around for almost 2 decades now and at the same time both the media industry as a whole and business on the internets are bigger than ever.

I keep sayin that in this digital domain warez and business are just two sides of the same coin and you could never have had one without the other.
It's exactly like Pipotron3000 said, piracy is good AND bad. Yes, it's bad for some business, but also actually very good for a lot of companies.
Just as certain business is good for some people and really bad for others.

Like everything else in this crazy world it ain't just black and white, and what people consider good or bad mainly just depends on their personal POV.
But the numbers don't lie, in the big scheme of things warez is not a business killer, and it will never come anywhere close to hurting the economy as bad as business is gonna do all by itself.

 

I'm the last person that believes everything I read. I look at who performed the study, how they went about it, did they make any assumptions, where did they get their data, how did they interpret their data, etc. Business is booming, that's why they keep shelling out that crap. How much the big companies made in a given year speaks for itself.

 

My thoughts....I'm old skool

I class downloading a movie or a song just the same as i would lending a cd or a dvd to a friend

They're both illegal, when you read all the bullshit on a dvd or cd it says "blah blah no lending, public performances, etc"

If that makes me a criminal...then so be it, that's what i am

 

There just looking to fill the prisons, as most prisons across the world are
becoming private and the shares go up the more people the have locked up.

How can you be a pirate when you walk the land, I thought pirate's sallied the sea's