p2pnet.net news:- Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) Top Dogs have scored another resounding success.

Labrador retrievers Lucky and Flo, credited with being two of the MPAA’s most intelligent operatives, unearthed a pair of tennis shoes MPAA boss Dan Glockman had lost during a ceremonial visit to Manila.

The two MPAA investigators are currently based in Kuala Lumpur where they’re leading Hollywood efforts to crack down on local counterfeiters.

The tennis shoes were found under Gloockman’s bed in what Mike Ellis, Senior Vice President and Regional Director, Asia-Pacific for the Motion Picture Association, described as a “stunning demonstration of their skills,” declaring, “We salute their outstanding efforts.”

Meanwhile, “The visit to the Philippines by Lucky and Flo is in part aimed at permitting the Optical Media Board (OMB) to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of canine anti-piracy investigators as the organization considers the feasibility of establishing a dog unit,” said a statement.

The MPAA is also rumoured to be training humans to work against Asian ‘pirate’ dogs which urinate on illegal discs to confuse Lucky and Flo.

“Our tests show in some circumstances, human olfactory organs can override the smell of pee,” says Ellis. “When our human operatives sniff out discs they suspect have been contaminated in this way, they carefully wipe them clean, dry them and re-package and box them. The discs are then given to Lucky and Flo who are able to tell if the DVDs are, in fact, optical discs.

“Once that has been determined, we run the DVDs through sophisticated MPAA equipment to see if they’re really real or just fakes.”

A comprehensive study aimed at producing a more accurate guesstimate of the impact piracy has on the film industry including, for the first time, losses due to internet piracy, recently calculated that the MPA studios lost $7,091.1 billion to worldwide piracy in 2005, says the MPAA.

In 2006, the MPAA’s operations in the Asia-Pacific region investigated more than 3 cases of piracy and assisted law enforcement officials in conducting nearly 12 raids, it says, also providing definitions of three of the worst problems confronting Hollywood.

Bootlegging: Obtaining movies by legging it to the local video store, renting DVDs, and then booting them up on home PCs. “People who engage in bootlegging should be paying additional access fees to the copyright owners once they’ve rented movies from video outlets,” says Clackman.

Illegal copying: Making copies. “This is just plain wrong and causes serious hardships to Hollywood artisans,” says Slickman. “New DVDs must be acquired for every new application.”

Internet piracy: Obtaining movies online from any service not backed and supplied by MPAA owners Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney.

For more information, contact:

Mike Ellis
MPA Asia-Pacific
+65-6253-1033
Margaret Fu
MPA Asia-Pacific
852-2785-8677

Slashdot it!

Also See:
Lucky and Flo - Lucky and Flo, back again, March 14, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

---

rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site

---

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under MPAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 12600 times