DVD companies adopt Adam Sandler anti-piracy measures

Taking a firm stance against the worsening global trend of illegally downloading films and series, DVD and CD production companies have today announced their decision to embed all their products with powerful anti-piracy measures, such as Adam Sandler’s Funny People or Jack and Jill.

"When we look at past cases of illegal downloads and internet piracy, we see time and time again how any CD or DVD protected with embedded content made by Adam Sandler is a powerful agent in deterring torrenters from stealing films,” said a spokesperson for Miramax Pictures, Hugh Torrent. “No one downloads them. In fact, the measures are so powerful that they have been known to even instill overwhelming sensations of nausea, vomiting and suicide in those exposed to them.”

"Imagine the scene: you're a pirate. You want to watch the latest Game of Thrones episode, but don't want to support the studio or actors in it. So you just illegally download from some shady site. That awesome theme music plays - we like to lull them into a sense of false security - and then BOOM. Subtle racism and vomit-inducing fart jokes bereft of any talent hits you straight in the brain."

Torrents said the historical evidence was powerful.

“Time and time again, we have seen the potency of footage embedded with this protection software. In the past we have run many, many experiments testing the latest versions of this defence software. Like when we first introduced the advanced content protection software in Spanglish and then slowly started to perfect it into its pirate-viewer-kryptonite forms in Blended and, oh god, Grown Ups 2. Literally no one pirates that last movie. Sure, it was so powerful it physically sickened legitimate viewers in the theatre, but that's the price we pay in the war against torrenters.”

And despite universal outcry from international human rights organisations and activism groups saying that such measures are “an extreme abuse of power” and “a despicably cruel extreme”, movie companies have stood by their decision.

“We’ve tried to scare off pirates with Cease and Desist letters, legal threats, huge fines, jail time, and really stupid anti-piracy adverts, but [illegal downloads] have continued unabated,” he said. “It’s about time we took extreme measures.”

However, the move has been branded “unoriginal copy-catting” by the South African film industry, saying they’ve been doing this for years.

“Piracy has been a huge issue in South Africa for years,” they said. “This is why we routinely protect our CDs and DVDs with content produced by Steve Hofmeyr and Leon Schuster – anti-piracy methods so powerful they’ve been known to make people commit suicide in the most brutal manner possible right in public places."

For those of you wanting to copy-paste this onto their own website without my permission, please study the image below.

Pic (my edit) made of Commons images and Head by Alex Neman. Yes, I know the hand is the wrong way round. Jesus, give me a break.

Facebook's lawyers destroyed by simple status

Facebook’s legal team is in stunned silence today, after their seemingly airtight, carefully constructed and extensive 134-page Terms and Conditions legal agreement was undone and nullified by a simple Facebook status.

“When we first started this company all those years ago, we knew we would have to have legal safeguards in place to control content, oversee copyright management, and provide a general set of user terms and conditions that apply equally across our user database,” said the legal team in a lengthy statement this morning, “but how were we to know that a twenty-something-year old in South Africa would have the legal genius to undo all our care and work in one simple ten-sentence status? It was sheer brilliance.”

Facebook now says that, despite their document’s apparent legal strength and imperviousness, this new disclaimer, containing just twenty lines of text, was like kryptonite on an Achilles tendon made of glass.

“It hit us like a sack of bricks,” they said. “I mean, quoting the Rome Statute – a document usually reserved for outlining a court’s jurisdiction, structure and internal processes – was just, wow, incredible. We never saw it coming.”

The creator of the post, who is amazingly neither a law student nor legal expert in any way - says that beating the system like he did requires nothing but clever manoeuvring.

“When you sign up for Facebook and tick the box that says you have read and understood their terms and conditions of service and use, there are all kinds of nasty controls put on your photographs and all your user information that you upload,” said Andy Vokate, whose work has gone on to protect many thousands of enlightened, seasoned internet users, “but when you stumble upon some very clever legal arguments that some companies don’t want you to discover, you’ll see that these contracts are not worth the .txt file they’re written on.”

These legal arguments are incredible, say legal experts.

“We know this argument will be very powerful in court because it’s filled with all kinds of law words and legal phrases like ‘articles’ and ‘hereby’ and, geez, ‘tacitly’. Oh, and ‘foregoing’!” said legal counsel Eric Manders. “And an even more hard-hitting part of the argument is citing UCC 1 1-308 – 308 1 -103 and codes L.111, 112 and 113. Personally, I would quote paragraph 123 subsection a1 of L ACB 123456 or the infamous precendent of Hugh Justin v. May Dissup, but this is as good.”

He added that most judges were amenable to arguments like “really, who even reads these long confusing things? We all know everyone just scrolls to the bottom and clicks ‘Accept’.”

“Especially if they’re an iTunes user,” he said.

However, this post may have opened the floodgates for public legal declarations and defences, with this judiciary tactic being applied to many other industries and services.

“With this new resurgence of customer legal protection, companies are now being force to issue counter legal statuses on Twitter and Facebook,” said Manders. “Pretty soon, we’ll be seeing counter-counter-legal-announcements, and counter-counter-counter-counter notices. It’ll be like Inception, but with more law and less confusion.”

Whatever controversy arises, judges and Facebook users alike agree on one very simple fact: that this definitely is not a hoax.

“This is perfectly sound legal advice,” they said. “I mean, if it wasn’t, would it really be copied and pasted by hundreds of other people? I don’t think so.“

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