Mischa Wynhausen, 31, of Irvine, CA agrees to plead guilty to one felony count of illegally uploading a screener copy of the comedy “The Love Guru.”
Mischa Wynhausen, 31, of Irvine, California has agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of uploading a screener copy of “The Love Guru” to a website operated by a piracy group that made the movie widely available on the Internet.
Facing 3 years in prison he decided to cooperate with authorities who then agreed to seek a lower sentence of three years probation instead.
Wynhausen is the second person to plead guilty so far in connection with the case, joining Jack Yates, 28yo, of Porter Ranch, CA who last year was sentenced to 6 months in prison for his involvement.
Paramount Pictures was set to release the movie “The Love Guru” in theaters on June 20, 2008. According to court documents, a screener copy to promote the movie was prepared for the NBC program “The Tonight Show.” When the movie was being copied by a company hired by Paramount Pictures, Yates, who at the time was an employee of that company, illegally made a copy of the movie. Yates later distributed the copy of the film to others, who provided the movie to Wynhausen. Wynhausen uploaded the movie to the Internet on June 19 and 20, 2008.
Wynhausen is expected to make his initial court appearance later this month.
The problem with all of this is that the movie was really horrible, and the leak, rather than decreasing profits, merely confirmed what many had feared.
Take, for example, the movie “Wolverine.” It leaked to BitTorrent a full month before its official release date
For all the fuss “Wolverine” still enjoyed a $85 million dollar opening weekend payday and more than $373 million dollars in worldwide box office ticket sales proving that if a movie’s good people will pay to see it.
“The Love Guru” was definitely not worth $10 bucks to see.
Stay tuned.
the only people that should be getting charged with anything are the movie studio execs that green-lighted that horrible movie.
It is a definite breach of trust for an employee to take a films and put it online before it is even released. Certainly it would be a firing offense.
At the same time, it wasn’t for profit, so to my way of thinking it was not so much a case of bootlegging, but rather personal use copying.
This was more like stealing a car to joyride with friends, rather than stealing a car to sell to the chop shop where it will be stripped or sold abroad.
There should be good reasons for putting young people in jail. 3 years jail time? The world has gone mad.
quote: “Wolverine” still enjoyed a $85 million dollar opening weekend payday and more than $373 million dollars in worldwide box office ticket sales proving that if a movie’s good people will pay to see it.
More like “Proving if a movie has the right marketing people will pay to go see it.”
Wolverine was pretty terrible, according to word-of-mouth (I took friends’ advice and never saw it). Movie studio folks tried to spin this bad word-of-mouth into “people are judging an unfinished screener leaked on the internet by eeeeevil pirates!”
Actually, many did in fact like the movie. I know I did.
If there wasnt any good word of mouth then not nearly as many would have seen it, especially considering it was floating around a full month beforehand.
The same couldnt be said of the first Hulk, which leaked and sucked at the same time.
Such a bummer, I feel bad for the guy/ gal (I can’t tell the gender from that name) because it would really suck to go to jail for booting a scan of this horrible movie. How embarrassing.
FREE MISCHA!!