Anti-Piracy Wonder Dogs!
Mar. 28th, 2007 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayA recent Metro Tech section had a brief blurb about Malaysian Video Pirates contracting a hit on some dogs who had been trained by the MPAA to sniff out counterfeit DVDs. This seemed implausible on the face of it, but I was curious enough to google it. Luckily, one of the first hits was the informative Techdirt, who had a lot to say about this incident, all of it snarky. (You can click on the links in their article to see their prior coverage about the dogs.)
These bootleg-sniffing dogs turn out to be real -- up to a point. Firstly, there are exactly two of them (Lucky and Flo) to battle all of worldwide DVD piracy. Secondly, counterfeit DVDs smell... exactly like legitimate DVDs, so you figure they have to generate a lot of false positives. Methinks this is the MPAA's equivalent of Security Theater.
These bootleg-sniffing dogs turn out to be real -- up to a point. Firstly, there are exactly two of them (Lucky and Flo) to battle all of worldwide DVD piracy. Secondly, counterfeit DVDs smell... exactly like legitimate DVDs, so you figure they have to generate a lot of false positives. Methinks this is the MPAA's equivalent of Security Theater.