(Berlin, 12 July 2005) - Again this year, the Zukunft Kino Marketing GmbH is promoting awareness of copyright piracy with a summer promotional campaign called "movie thieves are criminals". Throughout Germany, promoters are currently appearing dressed like policemen at such places as popular nightclubs, urban pedestrian zones and flea markets, to ask people how much their personal freedom is worth to them. In this context, the uniformed "officers" explain the potential legal consequences of illegal downloading and uploading films or copying DVDs. more ...

(Berlin, 12 July 2005) When do films become available online? Are successful films more susceptible to copyright theft than less successful ones? Where do the images come from, and the German soundtrack? Questions for which no answers were as yet available in Germany. The "Available-for-Download (AfD) study" , conducted for the first time by Partners 4 Management (P4M) and the RWTH Technical University Aachen, is an independent study whose objective it was to find neutral and methodologically significant facts concerning the topic of illegal copying of films. Among the ... more ...

(Frankfurt, 21 June 2005) The upper chamber of the state court in Frankfurt has sentenced a movie thief to three years in prison without parole. The defendant was convicted of distributing bootleg copies via eBay using various aliases in the year 2001. The supposed anonymity of the Internet was of little use to the convicted copyright pirate Oliver W. He was captured despite his best efforts to hide his identity. The court investigated more than 849 cases. In the end, 37 proven cases of copyright piracy were sufficient to convict and sentence the movie thief. more ...