Indian Filmmakers Plan To Battle Piracy — By Using Pirates' Own Computers Against Them

Too Much Free Time

from the all-your-applications-and-services-are-belong-to-us dept

Alarming news comes our way via TorrentFreak, who detail some brand new (and rather frightening) tactics being deployed by filmmakers in India, where piracy is such a huge problem that the industry was limited to releasing only 1,288 feature films in 2009:

According to Rakshitha, the producer of a new movie called Jogaiah, her company has hired an anti-piracy outfit called Shree Technologies to protect the movie’s soundtrack due to be released later this month.

“The software that we’ve used will help us track each person down, so that we can take action against them. It is much-needed in the film industry,” Rakshitha said this week.

Then, and without explaining exactly how the anti-piracy system will achieve its most extraordinary feat, Prem – the director of the film – drops the bombshell.

“All it requires is for someone to search for the keywords ‘Jogaiah music download’ and it automatically tracks them down,” he said. “If they have a webcam on their system and it’s switched on, it will also capture the photo of the offender.”

While this itself would seem threatening enough, Shree Technologie’s as-of-yet unnamed anti-piracy software has many more features:

ADDITIONAL SERVICES/PROGRAMS USED

• In addition (if their webcam is switched on), the user will be logged on to Chatroulette (Penises Only Rotation*). Their full name, phone number and estimated penis length/openness to random sexual encounters will be displayed below their face.

  * Syncs with Hotmail account (if applicable) to turn every third word of outgoing mail to "penis."

• If the user has MS Paint open, their photo will then be pasted onto the body of a stick figure who will be drawn violating random farm animals.* The resulting graphic will then be uploaded to the 4chan /b/ board for further mockery and captions.

  * Stick figures and farm animal drawings will be outsourced to Mechanical Turk.

• If the user has MS Word or WordPad open, an angry and threatening letter will be drafted and emailed to the editorial section of the nearest paper of record* via Outlook.** Users of OpenOffice will receive an emailed warning that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has shown that the use of open source software is surprisingly expensive, along with a rebate certificate good towards the purchase of a more hackable product.

  *If the nearest paper of record is the Denver Post, all personal information will be turned over immediately to Righthaven and the user’s name inserted into the byline of the nearest violating article.

  **If the user has Outlook fully functional, everyone will be duly surprised and the information will be passed on to the nearest Microsoft marketing team for further study.

• Those with Windows Media Player installed will be blasted with a repeated 8-bar loop of whatever shrill Indian pop song is currently sitting at number one on the pop charts, followed by an equally shrill voice loudly informing them that they should purchase a licensed version to avoid "further embarassment" and a stay at the "Police guest house."

• Those using other free media players (WinAmp, SongBird, etc.) will be hounded into installing some sort of extraneous toolbar. I mean, more so than usual.

• If the user is a member of "The Facebook," his/her status will be immediately set to "I STEAL FROM FILMMAKERS AND MUSICIANS WITHOUT REGARD TO OTHERS AND AM EMBARASSED. If you agree with this, post this as your status, only using my name instead of "I" and report me to your local authorities. ("Me" meaning the original poster and not yourself, the re-poster.)"

• If the user is a member of MySpace, Friendster, etc., the same posting will be made, but nobody will see it. Shree Technologies considers this to be punishment enough.

• If the user has so far refused to join Failbook, Failspace or Failster at this point, he/she shall continue to feel pointlessly superior to the people around them, most of whom have forgotten he/she exists.

ADDITIONAL SEARCH TERMS:

• "Jogiah iTunes download" – User will be berated by various musicians* as accomplices to Apple’s industry killing mechanism.
  *Basically just Jon Bon Jovi and Garth Brooks, who have sold a combined eleventy billion albums.

• "Jogiah musick download" – Will redirect to a variety of sketchy Soundcloud pages for the witch house community, swamping the user in montone dirges and abused Unicode.

• "Jogiah megaupload rapidshare mediafire" – Will redirect to "Did you mean: I want to go to jail".

• "Shrill Indian pop music" – Will redirect to this page.

• "Shrill American pop music" – User will be assaulted by the latest shrill pop chart topper from America, followed by a guest rap from Snoop Dogg.

• "Shree Technologies" – Will give you the Indian phone book, metaphorically speaking, but none of the answers you’re looking for.

• "ChatRoulette -penis" – Will redirect to:

  Your search – ChatRoulette -penis – did not match any documents.

  Suggestions:

  Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
  Try different keywords.
  Try +penis.

Filed Under: anti-piracy