well they've arrested someone in the screener case. good to see how quickly the fbi can work on when the case is something important like internet downloading, as opposed to a trivial matter like... i dunno... national security, catching terrorists, or other such trifles.

what kills me is that i heard this from snuggles, where someone posted the cnn story (sorry i can't link to it, cnn is hosted by aol & aol is blocked on the network here in the office... a policy i can't say i disagree with). what struck me about the cnn story is that it repeatedly claimed that this sprague guy was selling these movies online. like i pointed out last week, that's just stupid. what kind of moron would go online to buy a bootlegged movie? if you're looking for pirate content, why on earth would you pay for it when you can get it for free? i knew that had to be wrong, so i looked around & found the hollywood reporter article i linked to above, which contains this telling quote:

Johnson, the U.S. attorney, said that there was little financial incentive for Sprague to upload the films to the Internet -- if that is what he did -- beyond the simple trading of movies with others.

"There is often a quid pro quo among the Internet piracy community," Johnson said.

"There's no evidence Sprague was duplicating these movies and selling them," he added. "But anything is possible."

so my question is: was the cnn article just shoddy journalism? or was it intentionally shoddy journalism? (ie. did they just fuck up & get a critical detail wrong, one that nobody else got wrong, or did they get it wrong on purpose to help demonize sprague, caridi, & internet "piracy" in general?)

in related news, the RIAA has filed hundreds more lawsuits even though they don't even have names for their victims anymore: they're just suing a bunch of IP addresses... jeez.

& if you thought that was fucked up, strap your brain in before it explodes: remember all those little kids the RIAA sued last time? the ones they got such horrible PR for? now those little kids will appear in a pepsi ad about an itunes promotion. & the RIAA claims they support the ad!

who says irony is dead? irony 0wnz you!!!