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Disney Chief Bob Iger Doesn't Believe Movie Hack Threat Was Real (hollywoodreporter.com)
You may remember Disney's boss revealing that hackers had threatened to leak one of the studio's new films unless it paid a ransom. Bob Iger didn't name the film, but it was thought to be "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales." But now Iger says: "To our knowledge we were not hacked." From a report: Disney chairman-CEO Bob Iger confirmed Thursday that a hacker claiming to have stolen an upcoming Disney movie and demanding a ransom didn't appear to have the goods. "To our knowledge we were not hacked," Iger told Yahoo Finance. "We had a threat of a hack of a movie being stolen. We decided to take it seriously but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required." Iger continued, "We don't believe that it was real and nothing has happened." On May 15, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Iger told ABC employees at a town hall meeting in New York that someone claiming to have stolen an upcoming movie would release the film on the internet unless the company paid a ransom. Iger told staff that the studio wouldn't meet any such demands.
It was a publicity stunt.
The election was fair!
Oh wait... Wrong story...
Boy will they be surprised if the movie gets released to WikiLeaks... But who would want to steal this movie anyway.. That Pirates franchise is getting worn as thin as Keira Knightley in the moonlight after taking a coin from the chest. (Yes, I know that's not in the story, but think about it).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Never pay one person to not perform an act, when there are hundreds of others who are going to perform said act anyway.
Why not take a shot that the board is ignorant of technology and afraid enough to pay up, just in case?
it was a third-party editing company that was hacked is how the obtained it...
It's really hard to determine that there is indeed no leak, especially when you have so many companies involved in editing the film. What if the stolen copy wasn't a final cut, e.g. before the final color corrections or whatever the last few tasks are? It could have been stolen from any of the firms Disney uses to do that.
Calling this a bluff is risky. Disney could get egg on their face for it. Or they could be right. Or they could have secretly paid and made this announcement anyway in some kind of effort to save face (... which could backfire even more drastically).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
After all, if the movie was stolen, and then you find it, turns out it wasn't stolen after all. It is unfortunate, though, since now we will see a theatrical release of this turd.
Funny stuff.
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Most movie piracy was from DVD/Blu-ray screeners given out to critics or friends/family. Unless Iger's thought that he was going to try to defray the poor ticket sales of Pirates on it. "It didn't do well at the boxoffice because everybody PIRATED it" (pun intended) I wonder if the FBI got serious about investigating it and he had to walk back his statement...
Reading this headline, I had a brief moment of giddy insanity - misinterpreting it to mean that Bob Iger had suddenly reversed course and decided that the threat of average users copying movies and fueling piracy is not real. That there is no need for DRM, because the Real Pirates (tm) (not Johnny Depp) will crack and distribute DRM'ed content anyway, so the DRM only serves to hurt honest, paying customers. And that Disney, the leader in immoral copyright extension lobbying and DRM lockdown, would stop it.
Ahhahahahahahaha!!!! HAHAHAHAHHA!!!!!
Shit, that was a true 0.0257 seconds of pure insanity. Then I came to my senses and read the summary. Fuck.
It would have been *so* trivial for any supposed hacker to have provided proof, in the form of unreleased screencaps or video clips. I'm sorry, but no hacker with the skills to have pulled this off would not have realized that. I agree this seems like it was most likely a publicity stunt.
Get's hacked.
Disney quietly paid. They are talking smack to the press to save face.
There are very few graves that I look forward to pissing on as eagerly as Disney's.
That movie sucks so bad, not only moviegoers don't want to pay to see it, even the CEO doesn't want to pay the ransom for it.
You can't ransom something nobody wants.
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