Something for nothing

It is only human nature to want something for nothing but that is not living in the real world. The cheap DVD and CD copies that you buy from the street vendors are fake copies which may or may not play when when you get them home. The downloaded copy of a film or DVD that you get from the Internet may be of poor quality.

But even if your downloaded DVD or CD is of good quality, by supporting the pirates, you are depriving the industry of necessary funding to keep producing new material. More to the point, you are supporting criminal activity.

One way of getting current films onto the black market is to take a camcorder to the cinema. Of course, to do this, you need a good quality camcorder to get decent results and you need to be there when the cinema is quiet. After all you don’t want the sound of someone coughing or munching on popcorn in the background. That is precisely what a group of people were doing in Alicante but no longer.

National Police in Alicante arrested four people who were caught recording films in local cinemas to later upload them on the internet. The investigation began when an employee at an Alicante cinema saw one of the detainees recording a film with a high definition camera during a session which doesn’t attract many cinema-goers. Police searches two homes and uncovered a recording studio with several devices for copying and uploading the films, including three desktop and one laptop computer, a high definition video camera and a minidisk, as well as documents and receipts which prove they were being paid for advertising on the websites.

The detainees were found to be uploading the films, which were of very high quality, just hours after they recorded them and normally on the same day the films were released. They would use websites to distribute the links to the films, as well as video games and software, which were on servers in France and Germany. All of these websites linked to each other and could be updated from one of the computers which were seized by the police. They also used remote control programmes to control thirteen other computers.

It has been estimated that they have distributed hundreds of recent films in this manner, each of which has been downloaded some 10,000 times.