Simpsons movie pirate faces gaol

AN AUSTRALIAN GEEZER faces five years in choky for making a copy of the new Simpsons movie on his mobile phone, reports the Melbourne Age. The 21 year old Sydney man, whose name has not been released, has been charged with uploading the film to the Web within hours of its release in July and is due before the beak in October.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft claims it was the first illegal copy of the movie to be intercepted anywhere in the world, adding that the illegal footage was removed within two hours, but not before it had been downloaded some 3,000 times. But the file had already hit the file sharing networks and within 72 hours had been downloaded by another 110,000 people.

Two questions remain unanswered: 'What the hell kind of a phone does this bloke have that can record an entire movie?' and 'Who the hell wants to watch a big screen film on an exceedingly tiny screen, or a DVD copy of it in crap quality?'

The end result is so far from the original in quality terms that it is little better than taking a pad and pencil to the cinema and making sketches of the movie. In the dark. While eating popcorn. Film reviewers must be living in fear of the knock on the door in the night as the copyright secret police come to take them away for describing a movie using words.

No doubt phone manufacturers are currently developing mobiles with anamorphic lenses and Dolby 7.1 recording capability to cater for this burgeoning market. But, in the meantime, rest assured that while there are people stupid enough to pay for crap pirated stuff, someone will be more than happy to take their cash. µ

L'Inq
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