selective acknowledgement (also known as paid off by the MPAA)
July 26, 2005 – 5:39 pmwow. 2 days after “Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story” (the family guy movie) leaked and not a peep about it on any major news sites or gossip sites. i figured it would be a pretty hot topic since the movie is not scheduled for release to dvd until september. thats right. a full 2 months before the movie is scheduled to come out, it’s already being downloaded around the world, in dvd format and a smaller xvid (avi) format. it’s not isolated to torrents either. i personally have seen links to download off newsgroups and http servers so this isn’t a limited release. i’m fairly certain its out there on mIRC and FTP sites too.
this begs the question…is there some sort of secret deal the press has with the MPAA? how is this NOT being reported? when star wars was leaked, it was damn near front page news on every site. never has a leak of a movie occured so early as far as i know and the news media are just mum about it. i suppose seth macfarlane’s creation isn’t high enough on their radar, although, i’m not sure why. the family guy was the only show in history to be cancelled then subsequently uncancelled due to massive amounts of dvd sales.
so, in summary, the straight-to-dvd-movie of a history making, precedent setting tv show gets leaked to the internet a full two months before its release and it’s not news? maybe im a conspiracy theorist but something is very WRONG about that. maybe the MPAA is persuading news orgs not to report this so that they don’t get made to look like idiots. seriously, how do they look right now? after all the fuss about copy protection and threatening emails to downloaders, they get their asses handed to them by what is obviously an inside job. lawsuits and technology be damned, if you have a person on the inside ready and willing to thwart your efforts, you’re screwed. guaranteed if they find whoever ripped and uploaded this movie, it’ll be all over the news. until then, it will remain the buzz amongst message boards and family guy afficianado’s.
