So, here is my plan for directly copied stuff (as opposed to poor copies): Flood the market with “real copies” that stop after 5 minutes and are just filled with nonsense, or ads — or, better, just mixed up hashes of the actual movie (so you can’t just preview a sample). Then, flood the internet with it as “Avatar in HD”, so the actual pirated versions become hard to find (as mentioned above).

I may try this with Sagelight — flood the pirate boards with a pirated copy, which just turns into the trial after 15 days or so.

Rob

Although… Although! Though the usher thing wasn’t necessarily my main point, the fact is that at our local cineplex there is never any shortage of staff standing around vaguely around the ticket-checking point, though there are normally only one or two actually checking tickets.

I get the impression that it’s mainly an organisational thing – there are only ever a couple of screens starting at any one time, but timetabling people for ten or fifteen minutes of responsibility at start of each show, and making sure they get there and do their job, is more hands-on work than most managers want to do these days.

Agreed on the DVD front, mind.

You’re the evil cousin, aren’t you?

I think your thoughts on where the actual majority of proper copies come from are spot on, too.

We’ll see how that turns out.

Thanks to Graham Linehan et al at Twitter who shared the link to this post, before the internet exploded all over Jan Moir and the entertainment industry’s idiot wrongs got swept away.