That fellow was sentenced to a half year of incarceration for burning a DVD of Mike Meyers' epic dud of a comedy last year. Yates got a hold of the movie at the Burbank duplication company that was hired by the studio to cut promo reels for talk shows. When Yates was caught, in true American fashion he started blaming everybody else:

When confronted, Yates accused co-workers and Paramount employees of putting the contraband copy on the Internet. But videotaped footage showed Yates making the unauthorized copy of "The Love Guru" at work before leaving the building and then going into his car, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber said. Yates subsequently blamed his grandmother, saying that he showed the movie at her birthday party and she then gave it away to a cousin who gave it to a friend who was the former roommate of the man who is believed to have uploaded the movie, but has not yet been charged. In his plea agreement, Yates confessed to making a copy of the comedy and later distributing it to others.

Oh, oh dear. So the terrible leaking of The Love Guru was all Gramma's fault. Paramount was happy with the verdict, as, who knows!, had the terrible DVD not leaked online and been downloaded by sad weirdos 85,000 times, the film could have been a box office smash! Oh stealer of dreams, Jack Yates! Seriously, though, that really sucks dude. Shouldn't have stolen from work, sure. But six months in the clink? And for that movie? Pretty brutal.

In other piracy related news, a mother of four in Minnesota was just slapped with $1.92 million in fines for illegally downloading 24 songs off of Kazaa and then sharing them with other people.

"There's no way they're ever going to get that," said Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of four from the central Minnesota city of Brainerd. "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now."

Wait, she's from Brainerd? I know how she can get the money! Have someone kidnap one of her kids or something and then get the ransom money from her rich ex-husband and then have it all crumble around her as Frances McDormand foils everyone's plans and then finally get arrested in a sleazy North Dakotan motel. The perfect crime.

Don't do that file share shit guys! They're cracking down!

But even after a recent Chinese crackdown destroyed more than 47 million illegal publications ("including pirated DVD's," according to Variety), an exhausted government spokesman struggled to placate the West:

"In merely 20-odd years it is impossible for China to establish IPR (intellectual property rights) protection awareness similar to that of Western countries," said Yin Xintian, spokesman with the State Intellectual Property Office.

"As the country's economy expands, so does the production scale of each product. Taking all the factors into consideration, it is natural that there will be some piracy," Yin said.

There are fewer pirated DVDs circulating in China these days, though many people prefer to illegally download product or go to Internet cafés.

This sucks for us, who'd naturally planned to download the entire Summer Olympics before they're even broadcast — not just for the flexibility it gives us on vacation dates, but also for the furtive leg-up we'd have in Gawker Media's ultra-competitive Olympic wagering pools. We hope Chinese pirates media minds find a solution that works conveniently for everyone involved.

• China Takes Piracy Steps [Variety]
• Jackie Chan Billboard to Fight Piracy [Variety]

Ripped copies of commercial DVDs have replaced screener copies, thanks to early-release DVDs from other world regions. Those DVDs, which skip the special features and image processing that go into American releases, were originally made to sell copies earlier in countries like Russia, where pirated screeners get ripped to DVD and are sold on the street. But by beating the pirates to the punch in the East, distributors helped viewers in the West get high-quality pirated movies before the Academy even got their screeners.

But that's not all the irony! Fear of piracy can also kill a film's Oscar chances. Baio noted in last year's piracy roundup that late and broken screeners probably killed Munich's Oscar shot in 2005, and that Crash won Best Picture after sending screeners to all the voters it could, while Disney took such anti-piracy pains that over a fourth of Academy voters didn't even watch its screeners, and Narnia only won Best Makeup.

Since some studios seem willing to kill their chances at an Oscar just to keep leaks off the Internet, I want to know: How many of you actually pirate movies online?

· Though the number was down 10 percent from the same time last year, American Idol's 29.1 million viewers were more than enough to steamroll any doomed schedule-filler its network competition bothered to run against the Nielsen juggernaut™ [Variety]
· The Oscar season success of specialty units like Paramount Vantage, Miramax and Fox Searchlight seems to indicate that their major-studio parents have given up the burden of making "good" movies, conceding quality, awards-attracting filmmaking to their quirkier, lower-budgeted divisions. [Variety]
· The Sci Fi Channel has picked up the rights to Jericho reruns, demonstrating a willingness to weather the peanut-shipping wrath of the show's hard-core fanbase should the network ever decide to pull the series from its schedule. [THR]

(The duo have been dispatched to New York City by MPAA head Dan Glickman and Mayor Bloomberg, both thirsty for local pirate blood.) Once we managed to successfully tune out the droning voice of muffin-brained inquisitor Ann Curry, the moment Lucky successfully located the luggage containing the counterfeit quarry instantly thawed our icy, shriveled hearts.

• Fresh Off Malaysian Triumph, DVD-Sniffing Dogs Tackle New York [NY Times]
• [Today]

Two American sniffer dogs who found millions of pirated DVDs while on loan to Malaysian authorities will receive medals of honor when their six-month assignment ends next week, an official said Thursday.

Black Labradors Lucky and Flo will be celebrated at an awards ceremony Monday before they return home to New York, said Nor Hayati Yahaya, the Motion Picture Association's manager for Malaysia.

Lucky and Flo — on loan from the U.S.-based association — have helped uncover pirated DVDs and equipment worth $6 million since they came to Malaysia in March, Nor Hayati said. The cases led to 26 arrests.

While the story provides a fittingly happy ending for the duo, we're reluctant to think about whatever became of those 26 arrested pirates—though we feel compelled to point out that Lucky and Flo's coats have never been shinier since their handlers switched them to their mysterious new gluten-free dog food.

• Malaysian Award for DVD - Sniffing Dogs [NY Times]

Asserting that our neighbors to the north have become major suppliers of pirated pics around the globe, Warner Bros. is taking the unprecedented step of canceling all promotional and word of mouth screenings there until the Canadian government makes it illegal to take camcorders into theaters.

According to Warners, more than 70% of all pirated Warners titles released over the past 18 months originated in Canada.

"Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up," said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros. senior VP of worldwide antipiracy operations.

It can't be said that Warner Bros. isn't willing to take the extreme precautions necessary to curtail the criminal practices of these Labatt-swilling hoodlums. The sneak preview embargo is almost certain to cause panic in the streets of Sudbury and beyond, bringing the proliferation of wobbily shot handicam movies occasionally interrupted by a passing audience member whispering, "Could you let me oot? I want to buy a Coffee Crisp," to a virtual standstill.

• WB bans Canada promo screenings [Variety]

A copy bought for 10 yuan — a little over $1 — came with the vendor's caveat that it was "not good quality".

When played in a DVD machine, the screen showed a 2001 television movie "Earth vs. The Spider" starring Dan Aykroyd as a detective investigating the case of a spider-like killer. [...]

"Wait a few days," said a worker at a DVD shop in Beijing's Sanlitun embassy district, who declined to leave her name.

"I'll have a good quality copy for you then," she said, before recommending a pirated copy of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed".

It's but another example of how with piracy, everyone but the pirate loses—particularly the Chinese family man hoping to bring home the best American culture has to offer, only to send his children running screaming from the room when they wrongly assume that in just three short years their teenage webslinging hero has devolved into a smirking, corpulent, middle-aged man.

• Counterfeiters spin Spider-Man web of deceit [Reuters]

Nervous stall owners scurried away or locked themselves behind steel shutters when the two Labradors, trained in Ireland to detect optical discs, led government agents and representatives of the Motion Picture Association-International through the Makati Cinema Square mall.

In the first hour alone, Edu Manzano, chairman of the Philippine government's Optical Media Board, said they seized at least 300,000 pirated discs and arrested 11 people, who face charges of copyright infringement and violation of anti-pornography laws.

"They are the Starsky and Hutch of the Motion Picture Association," said the dogs' trainer, David Mayberry, a Northern Ireland senior investigator of the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

It certainly didn't take long for the canine agents to develop international reputations as highly efficient and merciless anti-piracy machines, with the faint, distant sounds of light panting and a flash of pink tongue striking fear in the hearts of even the most hardened Philippino film pirates. But it would probably surprise many to learn that both of the dogs are bitches, making the comparison to Starsky & Hutch less apt than, say, one to Cagney & Lacey, with Lucky in the single, career-minded Sharon "Cagney" Gless role, and Flo being the Labrador equivalent of Tyne "Lacey" Daly's married, working mom.

• Sniffer Dogs Lucky & Flo Debut in Manila [ABCNews.com]

[T]hey now will be based here "for the foreseeable future," said MPAA senior operations executive Neil Gane. [...]

The black Labradors will mainly participate in more Malaysian raids, but they also could be deployed to other countries for anti-piracy operations from time to time, Gane said. He declined to identify which countries were being considered, citing security reasons.

Anyone who remembers the last, unnerving chapter in the Lucky and Flo Mysteries knows why we can't help but receive this news with a mixture of deep pride for L&F's achievements, but great dread as well, as word on the Malaysian street is that the two black Labs have a bounty on their furry heads. We can only put blind faith in the Malaysians that the appropriate doggieguard detail will be assigned to their not-so-secret weapons, and that a special, dead-of-night mission to Bangkok to intercept the Far East's leading Wild Hogs duplicator won't instead result in a poochie ambush, wiping out our heroes in a hail of automatic gunfire and pulverized dog biscuits.

• D-Sniffing Dogs to Stay in Malaysia [ABCNews.com]

Lucky and Flo, the two Labradors who helped sniff out nearly 1 million illegal discs last week within days of joining Malaysia's anti-piracy effort, have been moved to a safe house, a news report said Thursday.

The New Straits Times reported that a source had tipped off officials about a bounty offered for killing the sniffer dogs, who are on loan for a month from the Motion Picture Association of America. The amount was not disclosed.

''The dogs are a genuine threat to the pirated disc syndicates, thus the instruction to eliminate them,'' Firdaus Zakaria, the enforcement director of the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, was quoted as saying.

As calls fly across town from material-hungry TV producers looking to secure the rights to our panting heroes' globetrotting exploits, we'd like to remind everyone that while their still-unfolding story appears to contain the seeds for the next great canine adventure series (with possible CGI-enhanced voicing by multi-talented spouses Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr.!), there are two very real lives at stake here that might at any moment be snuffed out by the silencer-muffled gunfire of Malaysia's stealthiest doggie assassin.

• Bounty Offered to Kill 2 Sniffer Dogs [NYT]

Lucky and Flo roamed several floors of an office complex in southern Johor state and detected the discs behind locked doors, which officials broke open with crowbars, said Fahmi Kassim, the Domestic Trade Ministry's enforcement chief in Johor.

Officials arrested five Malaysians and a Vietnamese man in the operation, in which nearly $2.8 million worth of discs were seized, Fahmi said.

"We suspected there were pirated discs in the building, and sure enough, the operation proved to be very successful," Fahmi said by phone. "The dogs were a big help."

The smooth-coated detectives usher in a new golden era in Malaysia's ongoing battle against entertainment piracy, liberating them from such outdated and unreliable techniques as knocking on random doors and asking, "Are you a DVD bootlegger? No? OK, sorry to bother you," or ordering military police to rough up Kuala Lumpur street urchins until they finally broke down and admitted who provided them with hastily subtitled copies of the popular new American action movie, The Evil Motorcycle Adventures Of Elvis Flaming Skull.

• Dogs sniff out bootleg DVDs, CDs [MSNBC]

• Dogs Used to Tackle Movie, Music Piracy [ABCNews.com]