Duff break: 'Simpsons' pirate busted
Associated Press
Saturday, August 18, 2007
SYDNEY, Australia -The man who made the first pirated copy of “The Simpsons Movie” was busted in Sydney yesterday.
The man recorded the movie on a cell phone in a Sydney cinema July 26, hours before its release to most of the world. It had been uploaded to a U.S. video-sharing site, downloaded 3,000 times and removed by authorities before it hit U.S. theaters.
But by then the movie had been posted to file-sharing sites and was downloaded an estimated 110,000 times over the next three days. The unnamed man will appear in a Sydney court in October, Australian police said.
He was captured by a combined effort of
News Corp. [NWS]’s Twentieth Century Fox movie studio, Australian police and private investigators from the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.
“In all probability,” AFACT executive director Adrianne Pecotic said, the video was “copied and sold as a pirate DVD all over the world.”
She said AFACT investigators found copies of the man’s recording that had been dubbed into French.
“The speed and spread of illegal copies across the global Internet as a result of this camcord copy . . . is staggering,” she said.