A man in Sydney has been asked to appear at a Sydney court in October: he is accused of recording the entire “The Simpsons” movie on his telephone and uploading to the a number of P2P sites such as Ares. His home was raided recently by police after the upload was tracked to his home. The likely punishment or charges have not yet been made public.Twentieth Century Fox (News Corp), Australian police, and the Australian Federation Against Copyright (AFACT) have acted together to locate and presumably charge the culprit with the strictest available punishment.

The copy of the movie was, the MPAA said, the first illegal copy on the internet – it was recorded on a cell phone in a Sydney movie theater on July 26 – before its public release to most of the world.

The recording was placed online quickly, but AFACT had quickly tracked it, as Adrianne Pecotic explained:

“Within 72 hours of making and uploading this unauthorized recording, AFACT had tracked it to other streaming sites and P2P (peer-to-peer) systems, where it had been illegally downloaded in excess of 110,000 times, and in all probability, copied and sold as a pirate DVD all over the world“.

We wonder whether the phrasing “illegally downloaded” infers that there was some illegal uploading occurring. Unlikely…

Illegally recording movies must really be getting easier: while in the past bulky recording equipment was needed inside the theater, now a simple cell phone will do the trick. Is it only a matter of time before theaters ban telephones, too? How else can they get around this?

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