Who's the pirate now?

[Galaki]

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Evidence Suggests Major Film Studios Uploading Movie Clips To YouTube... Pretending To Be Pirated

from the but-of-course dept

One of the tidbits that came out of the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit was the fact that Viacom quite frequently would upload its own clips to YouTube, but did so trying to pretend they were pirated clips. In fact, they would send employees out of Viacom's offices to local printshops to upload the videos under childish sounding names, like "MMysticalGirl8, Demansr, tesderiw, GossipGirl40, Snackboard and Keithhn," to make people think they were pirated copies. Not surprisingly, it appears that Viacom was not alone in this tactic. Slashdot points us to an analysis that certainly suggests that pretty much all of the major film studios were doing the exact same thing. There are surprisingly long and clear clips of various movies, uploaded at times perfectly coinciding with major marketing campaigns, and sometimes they can even be connected (with some digging) to marketing firms. Sorta takes the sting out of the claims that YouTube clips are so damaging, doesn't it?