Techdirt. Stories filed under "thieves"

Even Thieves Are Ignoring DVDs And CDs As Worthless

Mike Masnick — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:22:53 PST

It's been kind of funny to see that the various "public service announcement" videos that have been created and/or used by the government lately (see here and here for example) show people selling counterfeit DVDs on the street. There's a reason for this, of course. The one study that suggests any kind of link between movie infringement and organized crime/terrorism was based on some really out-of-date reports of connections between... counterfeit street vendors. But that was all from over a decade ago. Of course, as we noted many, many years ago, there's no significant business in selling counterfeit DVDs and CDs any more, because of competition from free file sharing sites.

In fact, it's gotten so bad that a new report shows that burglars in the UK are basically ignoring DVDs and CDs these days, as there's just not enough ROI on grabbing your dated movie collection. The Economist article linked above includes this handy dandy graphic to show you the trend over the past few years: So can we stop trying to link reports of online file sharing to street sales of physical DVDs and CDs already?

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Did Google Street View Catch A Car Thief In The Act?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:06:48 PST

I'll be the first to admit that I think many of the privacy concerns over Google's Street View are totally overblown, and the calls for things like blurring houses are silly and misguided. However, I was initially quite skeptical of this story, sent in by Richard, suggesting that Google Street View was useful in spotting a car thief.

The guy had a caravan that was stolen, and a year or so later, his son was looking at Google Street View, and noticed that the image of their house showed a strange man with an unrecognized SUV in the driveway. They began to suspect that this was the thief. The police were contacted, and they've now started to pass around the Street View images, asking for information on the man.

So, perhaps Street View isn't all evil?

Of course, due to the standard privacy concerns, Google blurs the license plates of vehicles, so the license plate on the SUV is blurred out. You can see it below: It's not clear why they can't just ask Google for an unblurred picture -- though, perhaps law enforcement has forced Google to destroy the original images? Good thing the family didn't ask for their entire house to be blurred, huh?

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Thief Steals Computer... Then Sends Its Owner USB Stick With All His Lost Data

Mike Masnick — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:35:03 PDT

Losing a computer can be quite traumatic, especially if you're not good about backing up your data. So, imagine the surprise from a professor who had his laptop stolen (without having backed up his data), only to find a week later that the thief had (quite considerately) copied all of the professor's personal files to a USB device (stolen with the computer) and sent the USB stick with the data back to the professor's home. It appears the thief tried to be as considerate as possible, in that while he had originally stolen the professors full backpack, including wallet, credit cards, keys and more, he later returned it all, except for the computer (and somewhat inexplicably, the professor's library card). As the professor noted, this certainly seems like an awful lot of effort to go through. None of this, of course, excuses the thief for stealing the laptop in the first place, but it's quite a story. Of course, the professor remains unnamed, so there's a part of me that wonders how true the whole story is in the first place...

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Using YouTube To Catch A Thief

Mike Masnick — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:55:53 PST

There have been a few stories in the past about people successfully catching thieves by putting up videos on sites like YouTube, so it's always interesting to see another person try it out -- especially when it sounds like the police aren't able to do very much. In this case, a guy who noticed packages often went missing from his front doorstep set up a video camera and successfully recorded a woman approaching his door and supposedly making off with a decoy package (the video isn't all that well positioned, so you can't actually see the woman open or take the package): What's interesting is that this is exactly the sort of case where police are unlikely to be able to be of much help directly if there's no other evidence concerning the woman's identity. But by taking the video and posting it online, it seems much more likely that the alleged thief will be identified.

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