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Sony Pictures Leak Reveals Quashed Plan To Upload Phony Torrents
retroworks writes Motherboard.vice offers an interesting scoop from the hacked Sony Pictures email trove. A plan championed by Polish marketing employee Magda Mastalerz was to upload false versions of highly-pirated Sony programming, effectively polluting torrent sites with false positives. For example, a "Hannibal"-themed anti-piracy ad to popular torrent sites disguised as the first episode. Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them. There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?
Uploading a fake torrent would only work for about an hour before all the leechers find out it's bad and stop downloading, reducing the number of seeders to less than a dozen.
All these studios (not just Sony) need to realize that people don't want to subscribe to an entire suite of channels just to watch 1 show. HBO seems to get this, but I imagine their new service will only work in the US, meaning the rest of us will have to get Game Of Thrones the usual way.
Summation 2
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
Pirate sites aren't in themselves illegal. It's the content, such as movies and such, that is illegal.
> While it might have the effect you suggest of reducing the market for actual child porn,
> I still think that there would probably be the urge to see, and pay for, the real deal.
and I have to point out, what you think is something I really don't know about. In fact, I think its something we can't really evaluate just by thinking about because there are too many things that COULD happen and little real way to say what would.
Does satiating sexual desire with porn increase the frequency or amplitude of desire? Does it make one want the real thing more if so, is that even relevant? Perhaps the desire increases but the satiation is enough to lead to apathy?
That certainly would line up with the claims other people make about porn. "Porn is why my husband no longer sleeps with me", may or may not be a legitimate claim but, is NOT an infrequent one. To be honest I think the real relationship between sexual desire, sexual action, and available means of satiation is, well, a sticky issue to say the least.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That wasn't their point. Their point is that they *want* the pirate sites to be illegal, whether or not they currently are, which varies by jurisdiction. Their legal logic (which I think is sound) is that by uploading to a site they would like to be illegal, they might be implicitly forfeiting their claim that such sites are/should be illegal, and they would do themselves more damage than good by posting.