Hollywood Director Asks Fans to Fake Out File Swappers

The world of BitTorrent mixed with Hollywood this week, and it turns out that's never a good combo. Saw director Darren Bousman may have tried to encourage his fans to upload fake soundtracks of his new movie to BitTorrent sites recently, and Michael Moore, or at least his lawyers, may have got more than they bargained for when they allowed Moore's new film Slacker Uprising to be distributed for free.

Torrent Freak is reporting that Bousman, who directed Saw II, III and IV, encouraged his fans to upload phony copies of his new film's soundtrack. While we could not confirm Torrent Freak's version of events, we did discover, via a cached page on Google, that there was some talk of uploading fake albums.

A search for "darren bousman fake torrents site:repo-opera.com" yielded the following result from Google, "Post by Darren Bousman on Sun Sep 28, 2008 11:45 am ... Upload FAKE REPO albums to TORRENT sites under the REPO name."

On the message boards for the new film, called Repo! The Genetic Opera, Bousman seems to have posted a thread that has since been taken down under the heading "REPO ARMY ATTTTTTACK!!!!! (NEW GREAT GREAT TASK)" where he told his fans he needed help to stop people from file sharing and thus hurting both the movie and the album. According to Torrent Freak, the party did not last long and soon people were complaining about the faked soundtracks and the files soon disappeared.

In other torrent news, Michael Moore's new film Slacker Uprising is being distributed for free on the Internet, but only to residents of the United States and Canada. The film's website says, "You can now sign up to stream, download, or burn a DVD of Slacker Uprising, free of charge." Citing rights issues, Michael Moore says that he's sorry he can't make it available to people outside of North America.

However, on the site Moore also said, "You have my blanket permission to share the movie with your friends, to set up screenings in your communities or theaters, to show it on your campuses -- all at no charge."

So what does "share the movie with your friends" mean? Well, in this day and age some took it to mean filesharing, and before you could say Roger & Me a torrent was born. The only problem is that once something is out there on the Internet without any privacy protection, anyone can get it. And that is apparently what happened.

Soon, lawyers for Westside Productions, the company that owns the film's copyright, were issuing take down notices to torrent search sites based outside of North America. There's no word on how successful they have been with this, but my guess is they won't get very far. A quick search on several torrent search sites shows that filesharing of the movie is in full swing and available to all.

I guess entertainment folks just don't get it. When it comes to filehsharing, borders are essentially meaningless, so the idea that you can prevent an international audience from accessing free content is, to be frank, ridiculous.

As for uploading fake torrents, well...I actually think that's kind of funny. A disinformation campaign against filesharers. You gotta love that idea. But what's more amazing is that Bousman would have fans willing to do this for him. That's a little unreal.

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