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Miramax gives free film ticket to would-be torrent pirate
14 Apr 2009 | 12.38 Europe/London
Imagine there's a movie you can't wait to see. Imagine you go to your BitTorrent tracker of choice and it's not there. So you go on Twitter and complain to the world at large about it - and who should reply but the film studio that made it, which ends up giving you a free ticket to see that movie you tried to watch for... free?
No, it's not the plot of some new anti-piracy movie - it really happened. We're all used to reading about record and film companies threatening, and sometimes taking to court, people who download and upload their media - in fact tomorrow the Swedish courts will announce their verdict in the The Pirate Bay case. Could this be a new, friendlier approach to cut down on piracy, one person at a time?
It all started when writer/photographer/Twit (that is the official name for a Twitter user, right?), Amanda Music left a message on the current darling of social networking hubs: "Ugh WHY IS ADVENTURELAND NOT ON TORRENTS YET?" There's a lot of speculation that the record and movie companies are - like the British police and Government - monitoring sites like Twitter, but rarely do they interact with us directly through them. Well, Miramax - the studio behind the flick - did reply: "Cmon Amanda, don’t do it."
“My friends and I usually wait to download cams of movies. We have yet to find one for Adventureland," Amanda told TorrentFreak. "So I was Tweeting about it. My friends were too though, but I guess they didn’t put torrent and Adventureland in the same sentence.”
Some of us might leave it at that, paranoid about the big brother powers that be. Amanda didn't. She says she was "joking in a way" when she responded to the film studio rep, writing “Okay I won’t, JUST FOR YOU.”
In an apparently new, carrots-not-sticks approach, Mr. Miramax wrote back, offering her two free tickets to see Adventureland. According to TorrentFreak, Amanda only ended up with one - but it's still one more than anyone would have expected and certainly a nicer gift than a legal writ. Whether this is a new strategy from the film industry or simply a publicity stunt remains to be seen.
[ TorrentFreak ]
No, it's not the plot of some new anti-piracy movie - it really happened. We're all used to reading about record and film companies threatening, and sometimes taking to court, people who download and upload their media - in fact tomorrow the Swedish courts will announce their verdict in the The Pirate Bay case. Could this be a new, friendlier approach to cut down on piracy, one person at a time?
It all started when writer/photographer/Twit (that is the official name for a Twitter user, right?), Amanda Music left a message on the current darling of social networking hubs: "Ugh WHY IS ADVENTURELAND NOT ON TORRENTS YET?" There's a lot of speculation that the record and movie companies are - like the British police and Government - monitoring sites like Twitter, but rarely do they interact with us directly through them. Well, Miramax - the studio behind the flick - did reply: "Cmon Amanda, don’t do it."
“My friends and I usually wait to download cams of movies. We have yet to find one for Adventureland," Amanda told TorrentFreak. "So I was Tweeting about it. My friends were too though, but I guess they didn’t put torrent and Adventureland in the same sentence.”
Some of us might leave it at that, paranoid about the big brother powers that be. Amanda didn't. She says she was "joking in a way" when she responded to the film studio rep, writing “Okay I won’t, JUST FOR YOU.”
In an apparently new, carrots-not-sticks approach, Mr. Miramax wrote back, offering her two free tickets to see Adventureland. According to TorrentFreak, Amanda only ended up with one - but it's still one more than anyone would have expected and certainly a nicer gift than a legal writ. Whether this is a new strategy from the film industry or simply a publicity stunt remains to be seen.
[ TorrentFreak ]