Police arrest the man who pirated "The Simpsons Movie" on mobile

Faces 5 years in prison

21 August 2007 9:22 GMT / By Paul Jeremiah

"The Simpsons Movie" is definitely proving to be a success this summer, catering to fans of the long running cartoon series.

The potential popularity of the film meant that extra security measures needed to be taken when the movie was first shown to prevent piracy of any sort.

These measures were proven to be effective when a man in Australia was arrested on suspicion of filming the entire movie on his mobile phone and subsequently uploading it on the Internet.

Digital sleuthing traced the suspected offender to an address in Sydney.

The 21-year-old has been charged with copyright theft and could potentially spend up to 5 years in the slammer.

Apparently, because of times zone differences, the uploaded copy was already downloaded more than 3000 times before the official film was even released in the US.

Not only that, the movie has already undergone a re-edit with an unauthorised French language version and is currently available over Bittorrent and other P2P services.