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Much of the way the movie industry looks to combat film piracy will seem familiar to readers of this site. It typically involves shakedown threat letters, games of DMCA whac-a-mole, and a paint-by-numbers approach that mostly amounts to film studios shaking their lawyers' fists at the sky. All that produces the status quo, where piracy is still a thing, films still make gobs of money, and regular observers of it all are left scratching our heads wondering how so much noise could be made over it all.
But I will give credit where credit is due as Costa Rican film distributor Romaly deserves some style and creativity points for its new anti-piracy tactic.
Romaly has employed an extremely creative tactic to reach out to would-be pirates. Their work can be seen over at LegalTorrents.net, a site that has clearly been modeled on one of the most famous torrent indexes ever. As the screenshot below shows, it is a semi-convincing KickassTorrents clone with a similar logo, color scheme, and word cloud.
[...] The torrents on the site are actually real, except they aren't torrents for the actual movies in question. Instead, the downloads play trailers for those movies along with messaging about how piracy has a negative impact on the film industry. But the coup de grace is the inclusion of an email address where the downloader can request two free movie tickets for the film they attempted to pirate.
[...] Attempting to build up some goodwill in the form of getting downloaders to the theaters is actually pretty smart.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:27PM (1 child)
Romaly is an idiot for trying this stunt. He's being clever, and convincing no one of anything. He ought to try listening instead of preaching.
Once in college, I saw a flyer advertising a free show of football follies. They even threw in free snacks! So I went, saw about 10 minutes of football follies, and then there was a scene with a football player resting on one knee, helmet off, saying what a difference Jesus made to his life. This was followed by a couple more football follies. The last 10 minutes was all Jesus, from the mouths of football players. Afterwards, took a closer look at the flyer and confirmed it did not mention Jesus anywhere. But saw in tiny letters in the corner, "BSU", which I soon learned meant "Baptist Student Union".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:27AM
Worse, Romaly is going to be sued because he doesn't own the copyright to those trailers. Sharing trailers is still copyright infringement and everyone requesting the tickets is identifying themselves.