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?

Well I don't doubt they would leak clips pretending to be pirates to gain the films attention. Its simple viral marketing. However I doubt those studios would leak entire films or content which they could make money on. Not to mention after the video got good enough hits its time to take the footage down so that those people go see the movie in theaters or buy it on BluRay.

I don't see what they did as wrong or pro-piracy. They simply used gullable crooks to promote their films.

Why not? You could leak the whole movie then blame piracy for your shitty film and sue the pirates for profit.

Oh shit. I didn't give them any ideas, I hope.

Which pirates would they sue, the fake ones they employed to leak the film?