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The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau is hoping to lay a little guilt on movie downloaders by dramatizing the stark human toll BitTorrent inflicts on Hollywood boom mic operators … or something.
ICE released the above 76-second public service announcement to YouTube late Tuesday, and began promoting it on 65 of the 120 domains the agency seized in its anti-piracy program “Operation in Our Sites.” Visitors to dvdcollects.com, for example, are greeted with an ICE message that the domain has been seized, and a link to the video.
“The public service announcement,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement, “will help raise awareness that American businesses, and American jobs, are threatened by those who pirate copyrighted material and produce counterfeit trademarked goods.”
The public service address shows a peddler on a New York street giving away free movies he said were downloaded from the internet. Beside him stands a soon-to-be unemployed worker. ”What’s more important,” he asks, “the movie or this human being?”