Are Digital Leaks Impossible To Stop?

If you plan to leak anything on the internet, you can relish the fact that it will stay out there. On the other hand, you can also feel confident that you will be caught, as one Sydney-area man discovered the hard way. The Simpsons movie was shown in Australia before the rest of the world, so he took advantage of the situation and recorded the entire movie with his cell phone.

Ahem. How many people are willing to watch a movie recorded with a cell phone instead of going to the theatre? According to authorities, over 110,000. This all despite the fact that they were on top of the case just hours after the movie first leaked. Indeed, if a movie is leaked, there is not much that can stop it. That still doesn’t mean you will not be caught and punished, however.

As it turns out, AFACT got a heads-up from Fox, which was monitoring P2P networks in search of the first Simpsons movie uploads. Yet even with this monitoring, it was too late to stop the leaks. AFACT said that in the short time it took to identify the leak, it had rapidly spread to other sites, and investigators even learned that it was rapidly re-edited into a French language version, and also transcoded into other formats and distributed via BitTorrent sites by two “organized release groups which facilitate file sharing.”

Source: Ars Technica