Hollywood studios busted as torrent-loving dens of piracy.

Hollywood studios busted as torrent-loving dens of piracy http://t.co/a0PseiWh

Now to be fair, what is being demonstrated is that employees within the studios (and it turns out the some anti-piracy organizations) are indeed downloading unauthorized, copyright material via bittorrent.

You have to wonder that, if the supposed damages done by bittorrent (never proven in any peer reviewed study) then it would be the people working in the studios who felt they should uphold the position of their employers. At least to the extent that they wouldn’t download copyright material on the job!

First up is Sony Pictures Entertainment. As shown below, on this single IP-address alone a wide variety of music and movies have been downloaded. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, as YouHaveDownloaded only tracks only a small percentage of all public BitTorrent downloads.

And then:

Another Hollywood studio where it’s not uncommon to download music, TV-shows and movies is NBC Universal. The employee(s) behind one of the IP-addresses at the Fort Lauderdale office in Florida downloaded the first season of ‘Game of Thrones,’ some trance music, a DVD of ‘Cowboys and Aliens’, and much more.

….

And then there are the fine upstanding people at Fox Entertainment checking out the work of a competing studio. Perhaps downloading ‘Super 8′ can be branded as “market research,” but in this instance actually paying for the DVD might be more appropriate.

After all, when Fox notices that one of their own movies has leaked online they quicklycontact the FBI to get the offender jailed. Ouch.

So, I expect there will be mass sackings over this? Unlikely as the position is really “do as we say, not as we do”. I wish I could find the link to a story of a year ago where one Studio executive discovered his children were downloading unauthorized material. Instead of doing what he’d do for any other person – sue them – he was going to give his children “a stern talking to”! Hypocrites.

The terms that best describe Studio or Record Company executives: clueless hypocrites.  My position is that is factual and let them try proving otherwise in a defamation suit!

Torrent Freak has even more examples, and then check out why not even the collection agencies believe in the law.

Update: Could not miss linking to this: ANTI-PIRACY MOVIE ADS CAUGHT USING PIRATED MUSIC  December 10, 2011

Netherlands composer Melchior Rietveldt composed that ominous techno tune for a local film festival after being asked by anti-piracy group BREIN, who are funded by Hollywood. A few years later, he got himself a copy of Harry Potter on DVD and noticed his music was suddenly being used for much wider use than he had originally agreed to in contract. Which essentially means that when they say ‘you wouldn’t steal a television’, that doesn’t quite extend to intellectual property.

Legal estimates put the amount of money Rietveldt is owed by pretty much every movie house on Earth at somewhere close to €1 million. Matters got even worse when the chairman of the board of the royalty collection agency in the Netherlands offered to help recoup the funds – but only if he could take a 33% cut. It’s bad timing particularly for the US, where the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is currently a hot topic for its intended transferral of responsibility for pirated from individuals back to small businesses and web hosts. After all, if they can’t even look after their own ads, how can they expect anybody else to abide by the law?