A quick search on my favorite bittorrent site, Demonoid, reveals a whole bunch of well-seeded copies of Michael Moore's newest expose documentary "Sicko". Quelle surprise!
When I first heard that the Feds were threatening to seize all copies, due to Moore's visit to Cuba during the making of the film, and that Moore had 'secreted a copy away off-shore', I just knew the screener copy would be, oh, accidentally left lying around. Maybe in the mailbox of someone with a DVD drive in their home computer and a cable modem.
Michael Moore is anything but stupid. He knows that he is more than a profit center for a film company. He realizes that the best way to both protect and promote his movie is to give it away to the public. Kind of like using the US Mail to safeguard something by sending it to yourself via China. Except in this case, he effectively emailed it to everyone in the world. This is just my theory, of course.
He also realizes, like all new-market consumers do, that downloads don't really hurt media sales, despite the squawking of the media producers. If anything, people are encouraged to go out and get the hi-def, permanent copy, for the better quality, the extras, and the sheer joy of consumerism.
After his beatification at Cannes, Mr. Moore probably feels a sense of duty to his message that transcends mere copyright law. A corporation can copyright their new translation of the Bible; what court would prosecute someone for photo-copying a Bible?
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