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.

Comments

I wonder if he leaked the DVD also.....

[xjerky]

....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).

Damages?

[timeOday]

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?

Re:Damages?

[Thurn und Taxis]

This is an excellent point. IANAL, but I think they can only base the cost of the theft on (1) the market value of the items stolen, or (2) actual (not potential) loss of revenue resulting from the theft. It sounds like they wouldn't have much of a case with (2), so they're going with (1) and arguing that most of the items have a high collectible value. If they could argue potential losses, the guy would probably be charged with millions in theft....

DMV Cops?

[shoppa]

Foley, 30, moved back to his native Southern California earlier this year to work at NBC. He was arrested at his Burbank workplace at 10:10 a.m. yesterday by officers with the Department of Motor Vehicles' computer forensics and investigations office.

The DMV cops? How do they figure in?

Maybe the real cops and the FBI didn't think there was a case to pursue?

Erm,

[Schnapple]

am I missing something here? This guy did Lucasfilm a favor. The geeks of the world were perturbed by The Phantom Menace and a few probably vowed to never see another prequel. However, Harry "LOTR OWNZ ME" Knowles says, "nah, this is good..." and the geeks regain faith. I mean, you can't buy that kind of publicity.

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...

Re:Movie pirates

[Quirk]

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'

Re:OH HELL NO.

[unicron]

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.

Re:Movie pirates

[Monkelectric]

I've worked in alot of different workplaces where there was theft ... and here's a few rules I've developed:

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 ...

Such a lovely legal system

[interstellar_donkey]

Take a copy of a movie and show it to other people while not making any money, go to jail.

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. ... 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.