Dave Horvath
17 Aug 2007 14:25
A coalition between the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Twentieth Century Fox organized a raid in hopes of tracking down an Australian citizen who apparently recorded The Simpsons movie on his cellular phone and shortly thereafter, uploaded it to the file-sharing masses. The three worked in cooperation with one another to Track down the leaked film that hit the Internet back in July, earlier than its official movie release date. As they soon found out, their raid could not keep up with the speed of the Internet and quickly fizzled away into nothingness.
Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of AFACT stated, "Within 72 hours of making and uploading this unauthorized recording, AFACT had tracked it to other Streaming sites and P2P systems where it had been illegally downloaded in excess of 110,000 times and in all probability, copied and sold as a pirate DVD all over the world."
Apparently AFACT had been tipped off by Twentieth Century Fox which had been monitoring several P2P network, searching for the first upload of The Simpsons movie. It noted that even though it was monitoring, the speed in which the movie spread was too fast for them to do anything about the leak itself. AFACT stated that in the time it took them to detect the leak, it had already spread to many other sites, had been re-edited into additional languages, as well as encoded into other varying video formats. All of these manifestations had then been uploaded to several BitTorrent trackers. Two different organizations were sited for releasing said manifestations.
The identity of the man who uploaded the original low quality stream has not been released, but he is expected to try his case before the courts in October of this year. No word was given as to how AFACT found this man as the original source, but it is speculated that a simple IP address discovery may have been used.
Source:
ARS Technica