Scandals are obviously nothing new for Hollywood, but this one screams hypocrisy louder than a coke-snorting Republican at a family values conference.
Now we all know the 1% in Hollywood has loudly opposed file sharing for the longest time. And who can blame them, really? Think about it: most of the industry has a good thing going as it continues to rake in billions of dollars for doing little more than recycling tired old themes with new CGI effects.
But I digress.
Yes, it seems as if alleged BitTorrent “pirates” have been caught downloading copyrighted material in several leading entertainment companies.
As TorrentFreak’s Ernesto reminds us, these are the same corporations who are just dying to disconnect people from the Internet after they’ve been caught sharing copyrighted material.
So let’s take a closer look, say, starting with Sony Pictures. Now someone at Sony has been very naughty indeed, downloading Conan the Barbarian, The Black Keys (song), a Beavis and Butthead episode, and Dubstep Mediations (album).
Next up is NBC Universal, where an employee or employees downloaded the first season of ‘Game of Thrones,’ some trance music, along with a DVD rip of ‘Cowboys and Aliens.’
Oh, and yes, let us not forget about the folks at Fox, who just had to watch Super 8 without going to the theater or buying the DVD.
Ouch.
So where did all this BitTorrent data originate? Why, off YouHaveDownloaded, of course!
The site is a new Russian-based service that attempts to track approximately 20% of all public BitTorrent downloads.
YouHaveDownloaded allows surfers to search for files or IP-addresses and discover who’s downloading what by accessing a massive database of 51,274,000 users and 103,200 torrents.
“We just want to remind people that the Internet is not a place to expect privacy,” site co-founder Suren Ter told TorrentFreak.
“Nowadays many people use it without understanding what information they leave behind. Also, even those who understand choose to ignore it quite often.”
Hollywood, what say you?
