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Sony Pictures Leak Reveals Quashed Plan To Upload Phony Torrents

Posted by timothy on from the trial-balloon dept.

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?

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Quashed? by ruir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Youtube is full of phony videos about "full movies" with a stupid blonde talking, or with malware links. Last time I started reported them, a received a message back as was flagging to many movies.

    1. Re:Quashed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Will you use you head a little please? That what it is there for, ya know? Instead of focusing on the technicalities, what I am conveying here is that they have no qualms about uploading fake videos, and this is just a stupid PR in a very convenient time frame. Oh poor us, we have been hacked, and we are so benevolent and law abiding... what a load of bull crap.

      Really? Did you RTFA? This isn't a press release - it's data taken from the leaked emails. So your theory is that Sony knew they were going to get hacked and planted fake emails talking about this to make themselves look good rather than taking action to stop the hack?

      What I don't understand is how Sony's legal department could claim that torrent sites themselves are illegal. IANAL but I'm pretty damned sure that if I were to go to the Pirate Bay (RIP) and find a link to the latest Debian distro, there is absolutely nothing illegal about that regardless of which site . What's potentially illegal is downloading copyrighted torrents and it's at minimum debatable whether providing a search engine for links to illegal torrents is itself illegal. But even if it's found to be conclusively illegal to provide pirate links, it doesn't follow that perfectly legal links to legal content is somehow illegal because it's on a site which also hosts links to illegal torrents.