Sure, the made-up swine flu pandemic may be the hottest item in 24-hour news these days. But if you ask us, killer viruses are still nothing compared to f**king pirates! With these 21st Century swashbucklers re-taking over the high seas, a whole new element has been added to life here on Earth. Here are 5 reasons having these lawless thieves around isn’t such a bad thing. (more…)

Twentieth-Century Fox was the butt of a big prank this April Fool’s Day, when news broke that a copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked onto the net. Movies get leaked habitually, sure, but the circumstances combined to make it feel like a first: It was a DVD-quality copy. Of a massive, big-budget superhero movie. Online a full month before the movie’s release.

The bootleg spread like wildfire, and by some accounts there were over one hundred thousand downloads on the first day alone. That’s a lot of conceivable box office revenue.

It felt like a first, but it also might be a last. Because the way I experienced it, April Fool’s Day marked the end of piracy’s glory days — the day piracy stopped being casually tolerated by everyone but studio heads.

This goes beyond Fox’s you-messed-with-the-wrong-people response to the incident (they put out a statement which went something like, and I’m paraphrasing, “we’re working with the FBI to make sure whomever was responsible will spend the rest of their life worrying about dropping the soap”). And it goes beyond the firing of FoxNews.com’s Roger Friedman, who won the Stupidest (Ex-)Columnist in the World award for writing a review of the bootleg and encouraging people to watch more movies online illegally. (Seriously, man. Twentieth-Century Fox and Fox News are sibling companies, what kind of false sense of job security did you have?)

It also goes beyond whether the movie was any good or not. I’ve read good and bad things; the majority of responses haven’t been promising, but then again, we’re talking about the internet. Do the disparagers really think watching it on a fifteen-inch screen with unfinished special effects will provide the same experience sitting in a movie theater will? No, they just like being negative.

What it really boils down to is that the online fan community itself condemned the leak. Universally.

Ain’t It Cool News, the granddaddy of online movie spoiling and fanboy bitching, ran a story called “We Don’t Want your Wolverine Movie Reviews,” explaining, “the only way you’re seeing it right now is through illegal channels, and we’re not going to condone that.”

JoBlo.com downplayed its potential effects, saying that “while there will always be a percentage of internetizens who actively seek pirated/bootleg/camera copies of movies, it’s probably safe to say that the average consumer still prefers the theater experience.”

TheBadandUgly.com said they stopped watching the bootleg after a couple minutes, in order to get the better theatrical experience: “Just because you can watch a rough-sketch and go somewhere on the internet to read the entire plot,” the article says, “does not mean you, I or anyone knows what X-Men Origins: Wolverine looks like. Because it isn’t done.”

And DarkHorizons.com summed things up by saying “It’s an act that cruelly robs thousands of people of not just months of hard effort, but their potential livelihood as well.”

That was the reigning sentiment: even if you don’t care about hurting a big studio, you’re hurting the hundreds of hardworking crew members who spent months on the project. If piracy translates into lost revenue, that’s going to translate into smaller budgets and fewer jobs.

If you really want a nail in the coffin? Even some pirates are speaking out against the leak. The New York Times ran a story called “Some Pirates Won’t Watch Illegal Wolverine”, while Gizmodo came out with a “Pirate’s Code of Conduct”, which contained gems like “save action flicks…for the big screen” and ” if you really like it and can afford to do so, buy it.”

Does this mean everyone in the world has suddenly found a stringent set of morals? That’s pretty doubtful. But the tide of public opinion has turned.  And I am sure about one thing:

The fourteen-year-old who stole the copy of Wolverine from his dad’s postproduction and posted it online thinking he was cool is totally crapping his pants right now.

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If your college is receiving federal funding, watch out for the piracy police when you return to campus in the coming weeks.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, requires, “colleges and universities that get federal funding have to come up with ways to deal with “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention.”

The bill doesn’t give specific methods for hunting down campus pirates, so the universities themselves have to devise creative ways, like Missouri S&T’s P2P quiz, to manage the illegal piracy on their own closed networks.

In the second part of their look at anti-piracy efforts at American universities, Torrentfreak.com analyzes the tactics used by piracy hubs – Ohio University, Texas A&M University, Tulane University and others as they implement methods preferred by the RIAA and MPAA.