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Leak Star Wars, Go To Jail
Shea O'Brien Foley, a former production assistant at LucasFilm, has been arrested on 13 counts of theft of Star Wars material from LucasFilm worth $450,000. The police investigation was launched after an early Attack of the Clones cut was leaked to and reviewed by Aint It Cool News in March, two months before it hit theaters. Other than the fact that Ain't It Cool News and Harry Knowles aren't being charged with anything, police aren't saying much. Apparently, Jedi mind tricks didn't work on the arresting officers. Update: 10/14 23:51 GMT by T : Michael Singer points to an article on internet.com with more depth.
....It was realeased on the warez scene back in August, yet the movie isn't due out until November. And it was the real DVD, not some badly-made bootleg (though slighty downsampled to fit on a DVD-R, you can barely tell the difference).
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Assumably the punishment will be base on the value of the "thing" stolen. How is that caclulated? Or will the guy go up on a more generic charge like breech of contract?
Being a former retail shop owner (video game store that also sold movies), I can tell you stories about how sometimes you get video tapes of movies weeks before they are supposed to be released. If you accidentally put it on the shelf a day before its released. You got a nice hefty fine to pay.
The movie biz is something not to mess with.
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
The DMV cops? How do they figure in?
Maybe the real cops and the FBI didn't think there was a case to pursue?
i don't know whether that was exactly the right call, but i bet the guy doesn't serve much jail time. his name in hollywood is mud, so he'll probably go back to debuque or wherever and start a new career making indie films about black lesbians rediscovering the joy of lyme disease.
oh and another thing. i predict matt groening to be the next target of geek betrayal and disgust. we've all known and loved him for the simpsons, but when the movies come out, they are gonna suck, and no one will remember him fondly anymore, and they will invent their own simpsons mythos that makes more sense.
then george lucas and matt groening will have a beard staring contest, and the loser will have to shave it off on PBS during fund drive week. at least that's what i heard.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Of course, at $300 million, Attack of the Clones didn't pull in nearly as much money as The Phantom Menace, nor did it do as well as Spider-Man, itself a $450 million film, but consider this: TPM was more for children (not surprising in the long run, given that the lead character was a child), so kids went to go see it en masse, dragging parents along, for multiple showings. Box office gold. AOTC, what with its violence (Boba Fett picking up Jango's helmet and with the head falling out probably didn't make parents happy), lack of Jar-Jar (kids these days don't know who Yoda is), and love story, didn't make the kids want to go see it over and over again. Spider-Man, however, did. No surprise there. Plus don't forget that Spider-Man had the bizarre "luck" of being a movie about a superhero saving NYC in a post-9/11 world. The USA decided they liked that idea quite a bit (especially with the New Yorkers bonding on the bridge against the bad guy towards the end).
I personally think the reason AOTC didn't do as well as TPM was because it was the middle film. I walked out of there thinking "great - now I want to see the ending" (episode 3). My test of this theory will be how The Two Towers fares...
Schnapple
This guy got busted because he went in a chat room and ran his mouth. I guess he wasn't a h4x0r or he didn't read enough text files. f00! Fux0r3d!
Seriously, what kind of socially-deprived moron would blow a job with Lucasarts by bragging about it on IRC? I hope he has Jedi mind powers to block out the force he will feel on his backside at Leavenworth.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
I know a few people in the film industry and Production Assistants ( especially 3rds ) are usually people who have film degrees but have failed in every aspect of the business. Maybe the guy was in his 30s, knew he wasn't going any where and decided to deploy his own 'golden parachute'
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Damn, I thought I was alone. Don't let it get you down, though. In the world technology and computing, /. is a joke. No one takes this site seriously anymore, and it's dismissed as a haven of wanna-be hackers and software pirates. What's funny is, watch how the posts die down during weekends. My bet is it's because /. is generally "tolerable-browsing" in the workplace, so you'll notice higher numbers during weekdays.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
If they actually charged him with theft, then with a good lawyer he could probably get those counts dismissed.
When will people get it through their thick skulls that copyright violations are not the same thing as theft? Of course, I would imagine that most purveyors of IP would rather the public not understand the difference between the two.
Hell, it could be more easily argued that early release of the items actually increased Lucasfilm's income. Good luck proving damage.
Normally honest people will steal when they think there is 0 chance of being caught.
People will steal the *stupidest* things just because they can.
People develop a sense of entitlement to what they are stealing.
The risk is almost never worth the item stolen.
I've seen people risk graduate degrees to steal reams of paper, risk a 200k job to steal 10k worth of stuff ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
So I guess that means that the Sith are going to kick the Jedis' ass simply due to sheer numbers...except that they limit their own numbers to two in the entire galaxy (a master an an apprentice. Guess that means they go out of their way to kill anyone else who has aspirations of becoming a Sith), unless the Jedi are simply deluding themselves about the Sith to make themselves feel better...
Looks to me like all these Force wielders are idiots. No wonder they've all but disappeared by the time of EP6...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Looks like "chrisd"'s comment about Jedi mind tricks was funny enough to be broadcast on CNN. They quoted it in a reference to the story about 2 minutes ago.
Take a copy of a movie and show it to other people while not making any money, go to jail.
... there examples a pleanty. But the moral of the story is, in America's justice system it's only really wrong if you don't make a fortune.
Make millions as a CEO through deception and fraud destroying the financial lives of thousands and contributing to the collapse of the economy as a whole... you can go free.
Sell a relitivly harmless plant to someone to help them releave stress, go to jail.
Make billions by putting out drugs at prices that bankrupt people less they die... you can go free.
The Internet is generally stupid
The other possibility, but I don't have a link to back it up, is that the shadows were only in some versions of the film. I read somewhere that Lucas continued to tinker with the film after its release and that, depending on when the date that the particular piece of celluloid was made, the film was that version. For example, if a theater got theirs a few months into the run or had to get a new version of the film, they got the "latest" version. This is why no one can agree on the exclusive scene for the digital version (the scene was included since there's less lead time on manufacturing - it was included in later celluloid prints, whatever it was) and part of the reason Lucas wanted the film to be a digitial exclusive - so he could issue "patches". We already know that the version of AOTC playing in hotel rooms has some differences (a few longer scenes) and given that the rumor is that there's been 50 slightly different versions of the film in theaters, it'll be interesting to see which one makes it to DVD.
Schnapple
Ok, so what about my right to watch my Lucas DVD's on my linux laptop? that's illegal.
and how about my media server so I can listen to my CD collection that I ripped to mp3's so I can play them easily in my home while the CD's are safely stored in locked media drawers... that is also illegal.
and finally... I make backup copies of all my software CD's... breaking any encryption and copy prevention so that I may make that copy and keep the origionals in a safe place. that also is illegal.
is what I am doing immoral? am I depriving anyone of anything? and is there one person on this planet that isn't a immature 3 year old that would not agree with me that I am doing nothing wrong.
HEY! I'M a LAWBREAKER!!!! and proud of it!
until the immature children that run the corperations of this country grow up and stop scting like spoiled 3 year old brats... I support any and all intellectual property theft.
They want to screw with me... I'll vocally support anyone that screws them.
I'm tired of it all, and if the only way to get to them is to take an anarchist attitude, then that's what I'm doing.
I hate sand. It is rough. But you are soft. I love you.
*groan*
catgirls and fairies
Believe it or not, it's possible to disagree with those laws & STILL not infringe on anyone's copyrights. I also don't agree that "copyright infringement" == "theft" (and, BTW, if you RTFA, this guy *did* steal stuff) but that doesn't make me a theif.
/. doesn't all speak with one voice. There may be some hypocrites, but I'm not sure that all the people here are--at different times, different people express different oppinions. That doesn't make them hypocrites. Please keep track of who says what if you want to accuse anyone of hypocracy.
/. viewpoint...
Oh yeah;
There just isn't one monolithic
... in the "corporatized" American justice system sure doesn't seem to fit the crime. These days it seems that if you work for a major company, the mere act of coming in late could lay grounds for the claim that you've cost the company $100,000. It's gotten particularly ridiculous in the digital age, where some lawyers seem to excel in arguing that intellectual property whose distribution is virtually victimless is magnitudes worse than the outright stealing of material properties. Sure, selling your company's product's codebase to the competitor is a crime, but claims like this one are far murkier.
In case anyone hasn't been paying attention over the past decade, the moral of the story for employees of the world is to watch your step. Because in huge industries where billions of dollars get thrown around in the production of what is essentially a single finished product, it's apparently reasonable to assert that your misstep as an employee has caused irreparable though quantifiable damages. These damages, though a negligible drop in the bucket for such an employer, can be easily enough to ruin the average wage-earning employee.
And no, I'm not saying that this guy did the right thing...