“Piracy. It’s a Crime.” PSA
From Wikipedia:
“You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” is the first sentence and commonly used name of a public service announcement that debuted on July 12, 2004 in cinemas, and July 27 on home media, which was part of the anti-copyright infringement campaign “Piracy. It’s a crime.” It was a co-production between the Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Motion Picture Association of America (now the MPA) in cooperation with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, and appeared in theaters internationally from 2004 until 2008, and on many commercial DVDs during the same period as an ad preceding the main menu, as either an unskippable or skippable video.
The announcement depicts either a teenage girl trying to illegally download a movie or two women attempting to buy DVDs from a bootlegger interwoven with clips of a man committing theft of various objects, and equates these crimes to the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyrighted materials, such as films. The girl ultimately aborts said download and the couple choose not to purchase any of the bootleg DVD copies. According to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, the announcement was unsuccessful, and was largely a source of ridicule. Likewise, a 2022 behavioral economics paper published in The Information Society found the PSAs may, in fact, have increased piracy rates. By 2009, over 100 parodies of the announcement had been created.
The intertitles use FF Confidential. On the computer screen, the text “FEATURE FILMS” is in Serpentine, “DOWNLOAD CANCELED” is in Compacta, and the remaining text in what appears to be Univers.
4 Comments on ““Piracy. It’s a Crime.” PSA”
The advert used a music track which they didn’t have the rights to use…. So they pirated it…..
www.theransomnote.com/music…
It gets better. FF Confidential was designed by Just van Rossum and published with FontFont in 1992. In 1996, Catapult Entertainment, Inc. made an unauthorized clone of the font and distributed it under a new name, “XBAND Rough”. Now guess which font the campaign used…
Kudos to Rib who tracked down a pdf published in 2005 on the campaign website at piracyisacrime.com. He was able to confirm that the embedded font is the pirated clone, rather than a properly licensed copy of FF Confidential.
Screenshot of the pdf in Adobe Acrobat, with the Document Properties window listing the embedded fonts including XBANDRough.
The font used in the work is XBAND Rough, a slightly modified version of FF Confidential
See my comment above ;-)
XBAND Rough is not “a slightly modified version”; it’s a direct copy of FF Confidential. The only thing that’s original about it is its name.