Prolific DVD Bootlegger Is 92 Year-Old WWII Veteran

from the mpaa's-worst-nightmare dept

The MPAA often loves to talk about just how evil DVD bootleggers are. They're the ones that the MPAA most frequently uses to draw a "connection" between "piracy" and "organized crime." Because of DVD bootleggers, we even got a ridiculous, 4th Amendment-ignoring law in California that lets police search DVD printing plants at random with no warrant, just to make sure they're not making copies of movies without authorization. Of course, law enforcement also has a history of seizing authorized DVDs and insisting they were pirated.

So, you have to imagine that the MPAA's PR team is not particularly pleased with the NY Times' profile of one of the most prolific DVD bootleggers out there: a 92-year old World War II veteran named Hyman Strachman, who bootlegs a ton of DVDs every month and ships them off to US soldiers abroad:

One of the world’s most prolific bootleggers of Hollywood DVDs loves his morning farina. He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of “The Hangover,” “Gran Torino” and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas.

“Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are some great pictures in the article, which show that he's actually using some sophisticated equipment, including a professional DVD duplicator that lets him make seven copies at once. He estimates that he spends about 60 hours a week bootlegging movies. By his own estimates, he sends about 80,000 DVDs per year, and has probably sent over 300,000 total since he started. And soldiers in the field love him for it.

An MPAA spokesperson admits that he "did not believe [the MPAA] studios were aware of Mr. Strachman's operation" and then delicately stated, "We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to [soldiers] while they are away from home." However, you have to imagine that they're seething about the NY Times highlighting how much good a bootlegging operation can do.

Of course, the real shame in all of this is that the MPAA could -- and probably should -- be doing this directly themselves. They should be providing DVDs or streams free of charge to the military. Instead, in their insane fear of piracy, they make it complicated to impossible for soldiers to view films, even when they decide to send them over: "studios do send military bases reel-to-reel films, which are much harder to copy, and projectors for the troops overseas." Because that's exactly what you want for soldiers in the field: having to carry around and mess with heavy and annoying equipment that's likely to break.

As for Strachman, he seems to hope that his age and the fact that he's not doing this for money will protect him:

"If I were younger, maybe I’d be spending time in the hoosegow."

Filed Under: bootleg, dvd, hyman strachman, mpaa, world war two

French Tweeters Get Around Ban On Tweeting Election Results Using WWII-Era Codes

from the gouda-cheese dept

Last week, we wrote about how French Twitter users were being warned not to use social media tools like Twitter to reveal local polling or election results before all the French voting booths closed in the Presidential election. We pointed out how silly this was, and it appears that folks in France used a simple mechanism to get around the rules: using WWII-era coding techniques to share information in the same manner that the French Resistance used:

As a result, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy became either Tokaji wine which, like his father, comes from Hungary, or Rolex because of his perceived "bling-bling" lifestyle.

His Socialist opponent Francois Hollande was either Gouda cheese (from Holland) or a soft, sweet "Flanby" caramel desert -- an old and unforgiving nickname for the portly frontrunner.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen was associated with the names of totalitarian regimes or rodents and Communist Party-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon was either a rotten tomato or something linked to the former Soviet Union.

From there, it sounds like people just had fun with it, figuring out all sorts of ways to obliquely refer to the different candidates and how well they were doing without directly referring to any of them. Once again, the internet views censorship as an obstacle, and routes around it, through a rather creative form of "encryption."

Filed Under: code, election, france, social media, world war two