US Homeland Security, which is supposed to be defending the country from terrorists, is using taxpayer money to defend the business model of Big Content.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement is investigating the piracy of the Lionsgate action flick The Expendables 3. Lionsgate made calls to several law-enforcement agencies to using their spying technology to locate the pirates, who are accused of leaking a full version of the pic on various file-sharing sites last week.
Apparently, it is not so unusual lately for the men in black, who you would think would be dealing with people with guns trying to bring down the government, to be defending big corporate interests. U.S. Customs was merged into USDHS, and it investigates illegally distributed copyrighted materials, including media content.
In the past, it has actually seized domain names of websites used to illegally distribute media content and/or counterfeit goods.
Lionsgate filed suit against the sites hosting the pic and the same day it dropped the final trailer (see it below) that opens wide August 15.
The digital copy was stolen from the Studio last week and news of the download surfacing wide by the time Comic-Con was in full swing last weekend. There were 250,000 downloads on that first day and an estimated two million afterwards.
