The Ethics of Posting Leaked, Pirated Footage

I don't know about you, but I have some morals. Then again, I make a bad used-car salesman, a horrible real estate agent or quick witted gossip news writer. I just don't lie enough to bait in the readers or customers.

But what has sparked this tiny tirade?

A few videos have made their way online that were taken by hand-held devices and then put up on the internet. Then there were a slew of websites that are reposting this content.

These are unofficial versions that look like shit, sound worse than shit, and not to really mention the obvious, but are pirated out of Hall H or Ballroom 20 from Comic-Con. Look at that crap... that's what people are drooling about and watching. Then imagine it with the sound bouncing off walls and the crowd cheering and drowning out other aspects of it.

Now if you have ever bee to Comic-Con then you know that there are all kinds of warnings about not video taping things, from automated slides on large screens to the panel hosts that usually will let you know that taping and posting is not cool.

But people will be people. I get that. And if they're silly enough to post, so be it. But now I'm seeing a bundle of sites reposting this content, with no worries about what they're doing.



It is on the website https://vid.me with a highly obscure name, but everyone is linking to it and embedding it, so it ain't hard to find. At this point, it has had 8.2 million views and 33 thousand were watching when I brought it up.

And then you have folks commenting on this fuzzy crap video, "just be grateful someone was awesome enough to share the trailer" or that the obvious, the quality of the tiny moving image in the clip was horrible and the jokes, well, seriously sucked.

And of course there are the flamers trying to pitch their own crap in the comments. Too funny.

But even if folks aren't reposting it, many are pointing to it being leaked.

Then there are those that have titles like "Watch the Deadpool Trailer from Comic-Con".... but they don't have it. It's just a title.

The Google Search revealed 10.6 million results.

Now Disney/Marvel must love this kind of coverage, there's no denying that. And sure, I may be over-critical, but this is just a tiny part of our society where people don't give a crap about what folks say. It's probably the same segment of people that steal movies online, to "preview" them before they buy them.  LOL... yes, that is what they say. Serious.

As it stands, of the few clips that have been pirated over the weekend at Comic-Con, one of them has been released already and the Deadpool trailer is supposedly coming in three weeks. Warner Bros put out a statement about why they released their pirated trailer for Suicide Squad today:

"Warner Bros. Pictures and our anti-piracy team have worked tirelessly over the last 48 hours to contain the Suicide Squad footage that was pirated from Hall H on Saturday. We have been unable to achieve that goal. Today we will release the same footage that has been illegally circulating on the web, in the form it was created and high quality with which it was intended to be enjoyed. We regret this decision as it was our intention to keep the footage as a unique experience for the Comic Con crowd, but we cannot continue to allow the film to be represented by the poor quality of the pirated footage stolen from our presentation."  - Sue Kroll, President Worldwide Marketing and International Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures

Meanwhile, the Disney/Marvel flick is still running rampant. This leads me to believe they want it out there. That there's sketchy faith in the flick, so why not leave it up?

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For me, there are two kinds of unethical folks. Those who tape the content and redistribute it. Then there are those that point to it or rebroadcast it on their own sites. These sites have been out and out hosting it in posts:  bgr.com, independent.co.uk, thedailybeast.com, uproxx.com. These are just the first few. I won't redistribute pirated content. I just can't do it.

So why the delay from showing at Comic-Con and releasing a real trailer in the wild? The hype and the honor!

As WB put it, if you don't release a trailer that was shown at SDCC, then it is something only SDCC attendees have seen, making the weekend worth their while, as part of their own unique experience. If you saw what these folks pay for a weekend at SDCC, they deserve 'their eyes only' moments.

But there's also the hype that's going crazy and driving the awareness of the subject film up a notch or two. With the advent of blogging, the free publicity is now a huge piece of the pie.And when people screw over the intended process, well, it sucks for most. But this hype is unavoidable. It can't hurt. Yet.

I hope WB and the other entertainment entities pursue this pirating thing to the end and they snag someone.

Update/PS: Let's add ComicBookMovie to the list, but they're boasting a better quality version of Deadpool!
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