Well a recent court appeal from a Hong Kong movie pirate has been thwarted by the Hong Kong government. Apparently Chan Nai-ming (who goes by the alias Big Crook) was distributing 3 movies through BitTorrent and was caught red handed by a Hong Kong customs officer.
The 3 movies he was distributing were, Dare-Devil, Miss Congeniality and Red Planet. Chan’s argument was that he merely allowed other BitTorrent users to make a copy of the files he had on his computer, and was not trying to transfer his copy to other users.
Chan had posted a message inviting BT users to download a movie on an internet movie forum called “bt.movie.hk” using his “Big Crook” pseudonymn. The Hong Kong government welcomed the judgment, saying it clarified the law regarding internet piracy. “This judgment has confirmed that it commits a crime and violates copyright laws for the act of using BT software to upload and distribute,” said customs official Tam Yiu-keung in a written statement.
This is awesome, BitTorrent users have been running rampant since the dawn of time. I don’t think Chan meant anything by distributing the movies, plus they were crappy movies anyway :p All jokes aside, definitely a good move in the right direction for movie piracy.
