infinite improbability

So, it really was an insider pirating movies

I've said for a while that instead of putting the movie piracy guilt trip on paying movie patrons with those ads that the MPAA has been running before movies that the MPAA should be putting the blame where it belongs--on insiders. Several months back, MIT released a study that concluded that the majority of pirated movies available for download had to be industry insider leaks. The MPAA, of course, denied that they had any problems with insider piracy and kept insisting that the main problem was camera-in-the-theater piracy. If it wasn't obvious already that insider piracy was a problem, it should have been once the Academy screener for Something's Gotta Give showed up on the internet. It has reached the point where the MPAA better wake up and smell the coffee, now that an Academy member has been found to have passed on Academy Awards screeners to a man who then pirated them, and has been doing so for the last three years. The man who was doing the copying, one Russell W. Sprague age 51, has been arrested, but the Academy member Carmine Caridi, age 69, has not.

Both the MPAA and the RIAA have a problem with insider leaks that needs to be dealt with. There is no way that so many movies and albums could have shown up online before their release date without insider cooperation. Even radio stations have gotten into the act--93.3 WFLZ out of Tampa aired a bootleg copy of The Eminem Show, in it's entirety, weeks before it was released (yet, this afternoon, their morning DJ, who moonlights as a political talk radio host was saying on his afternoon talk show that music pirates should have the book thrown at them. Go figure). Until the MPAA and RIAA come to grips with the insider piracy, they're never going to be able to stop piracy and downloading.