Not even the major players practice what they preach

Dec 14, 2011 13:39 GMT  ·  By

The recently released website, Youhavedownloaded.com, turned out to be a great opportunity for piracy supporters to prove that even those who fight long and expensive battles against copyright infringers don’t always obey the rules they make.

After obtaining the IP-ranges of some major Hollywood studios, the guys at TorrentFreak started checking them out to see if they pop-up on the website that monitors 20% of all public torrent downloads.

Sony Pictures Entertainment was first on the list that would soon become a list of shame. A single one of their IPs was found to download music, TV series and motion pictures such as Conan the Barbarian.

The employees of NBC Universal from the office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, have also committed piracy acts, the YouHaveDownloaded clearly showing that they downloaded Cowboys and Aliens, an entire season of Game of Thrones and How to Make It in America.

Fox employees from Valley Village in California didn’t bother to purchase a Blu-Ray disk with the Super 8 movie, instead, they downloaded the BR Rip version from a torrent website.

Other organizations such as Google and Church of God we also caught with their pants down, the former being responsible for stealing even Windows 7 copies.

An interesting situation is happening at BitTorrent Inc’s headquarters in San Francisco. None of their employees are downloading content, or at least not from the monitored locations.

Since they didn’t want to cause trouble for those who actually downloaded the files, he exact IP addresses were blanked out.

Now there are two major possibilities. The studios whose names were defamed will state that the content was taken as part of their search for Internet pirates, or they’ll start hunting down the employees actually responsible in the attempt of cleaning their names. We’ll just have to wait and see.