As Google’s cache at the time revealed, DeSoto uploaded torrents to The Pirate Bay including The King’s Speech, Rabbit Hole, 127 Hours, The Fighter and Black Swan, all between January 23 and January 29. As a member of the Guild, DeSoto had access to DVD quality screeners which were delivered to him via the use of special codes on the iTunes store.

According to Wired, DeSoto, who had a bit-part in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, agreed Monday to plead guilty to one count of breaching the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 for uploading the movie Black Swan to BitTorrent. He faces a maximum of 3 years in prison although the state is seeking three years probation.

So how did DeSoto find himself in the arms of the FBI? According to the affidavit, that was made easy by an almost unbelievable series of amateurish mistakes.

After being hired by Paramount Pictures to monitor online piracy for the movie The Fighter, on January 28th Deluxe Webwatch discovered a high-quality screener version being made available by release group TiMPE.

Politely the group indicated that the source of the file as being a “720p SAG screener (mf34inc)”, but unfortunately this courtesy was to set the ball rolling in DeSoto’s direction.

After downloading the movie but failing to find a previously implanted watermark, nor any evidence to show the movie had come from iTunes, Deluxe went back to Paramount. It turned out that the studio had indeed put specific marks into the iTunes version of the movie.

Rather than hunt down TiMPE, Deluxe was told to find “mf34inc” and for this they rolled out one of the world’s most powerful detective tools – Google. Their search led them to The Pirate Bay where they found a user of the same name who had uploaded The Fighter plus 127 Hours, The Kings Speech and Black Swan.

While Deluxe were clearly too late to find the IP address of mf34inc when the previous movies were uploaded, all they had to do was remain patient for more uploads. On January 28th they struck gold, as the same user began to upload another screener, this time of the movie Rabbit Hole. His IP address had been logged and the chase was on.

The next pieces of evidence against DeSoto came thanks to him responding to criticism in The Pirate Bay’s comment section. After several users questioned the authenticity of the file, mf34inc weighed in with “SAG now send out iTunes download codes for screeners” and the utterly priceless “I’m a SAG member and thought i’d share these.”

Armed with mf34inc’s IP address and a timestamp from the Rabbit Hole upload (allocated to Time Warner Cable / Road Runner), investigators asked the ISP to show who was using the resource at the time. It led directly to one of their subscribers – one Wesley DeSoto of Los Angeles. But it gets worse.

According to iTunes, the account name registered to the download of The Fighter was “wes@mf34.com”. Furthermore, the IP address used to download The Fighter from iTunes matched the IP address used to upload Rabbit Hole to The Pirate Bay.

From here DeSoto’s details were cross-referenced with the California Department of Motor Vehicles Database and his photo was obtained. But the simple username mf34inc was to prove an even more fruitful source of evidence for investigators.

By using Google again, Deluxe discovered that mf34inc was a reference to a clothing company called m34, short for The March Forth. When searching YouTube, Deluxe found an account for the company with the name of – you’ve guessed it – mf34inc.

In a video uploaded to the account, a BMX rider on The March Forth’s racing team said: “Wes over there is a really cool guy, takes care of all of us.” Wes, it transpires, is the owner of The March Forth.

A visit to DeSoto’s Linkedin profile yielded another photograph. It matched the one on his driving license.

After all the dots had been joined, DeSoto had a visit from the FBI. Following his arrest he said he was a “nobody” in the file-sharing world and denied being a member of a release group. From DeSoto’s catalogue of errors, which if anything seem to suggest that he didn’t even attempt to cover his tracks, no one will be disputing his version of events.

DeSoto is expected in court next month.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

December is traditionally the month when a lot DVD-screeners are sent out to the Oscar voters, and also the time when a lot of these screeners leak. Unfortunately for some, there are pirates among the members of this elite group of movie industry insiders, and measures have to be taken to make it harder to leak the films.

One of the measures is watermarking where the DVD-screeners all get a unique, hidden watermark, so potential leaks can be traced back to the source. Another, perhaps even more effective preventive measure that was used by some studios is the SV-300, a custom-made DVD player that’s been in use since 2004.

The player is developed by Cinea, a division of Dolby Laboratories, and it is used to play encrypted disks that will only play on this particular player. The SV-300 makes it nearly impossible to copy and leak a screener, but surprisingly, the developer decided to phase out the machine because of the negative feedback from the Academy members. It turns out that the Oscar voters don’t like the DRM-machine because it hurts their viewing pleasure:

The machine operating the S-View software that scored few points for being user-friendly in its brief run. Its user base complained of the impracticality of having to lug the machine around on vacation during the holiday season, the height of the screening period.

So what they basically say is: “We don’t like DRM”. I can’t agree more of course, but it is kind of ironic that they tend to get more aggressive in imposing DRM on their customers because they are afraid of piracy, while they abandon this effective anti-piracy player because the DRM doesn’t allow them to watch the screeners on vacation.

Don’t think that the industry insiders are unaware of this, hypocritical as they are, they try to talk it right with some strange arguments. Industry insiders now say that Oscar screeners are not considered a primary contributor to movie piracy. This is strange because only 4 years ago Hollywood lobbied for a total ban of Oscar screeners.

I guess it’s all different when your personal viewing pleasure is at stake.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Almost all oscar winners are in the search cloud. Crash of course as the Best motion picture of the year, Brokeback mountain, King Kong, Syriana, Walk the line, Capote, The constant Gardener, Memoirs of Geisha, Hustle and flow, and The chronicles of Narnia.

Even Tsotsi (foreign language) and March of the Penguins (documentary) are in there

Actually, the only Oscar winners not in the list are the animated and short films. Wallace and Gromit (animated film), The moon and the Sun (animated short film), Six Shooter (live action short film) and A note of Triumph (short movie).

But people are not only looking for the movies, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the show as well because search terms like Academy, Academy awards, Oscar and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.