About a week before the premiere of the sixth season of , the first four episodes of that season became available online. Not on the
24 website or the FOX website, but illegally on torrent and file sharing sites around the net. Of course, this was an upsetting event for FOX, who had a two-night, four episode extravaganza scheduled for the
24 premiere. The premiere went off as planned, but any fan of
24 who wanted an early peek at the first four episodes could get it.
FOX gave the FBI a call to see if they could find someone to blame for the leak. The FBI found Chicago-based man Jorge Romero, a man they plan to prosecute to the full extent of the law. Romero, who happens to be 24 years of age, found those first four episodes online and decided to upload them to a media-sharing site called LiveDigital.com. Bad idea. Romero now faces up to three years in prison.
To make it perfectly clear, however, Romero was not the leak of the episodes, he's merely a dude who found the episodes on line, and uploaded them to a site that would've eventually gotten the episodes anyways. This sort of thing happens all the time on the internet. Romero was dense to think that he could upload pirated episodes on a site where he was a registered user, those four episodes were disseminated all across the internet within the span of days. Guys like Jorge Romero are not the people that FOX should be worrying about.
If you're going to get the FBI involved, why not attempt to find the initial leak? Isn't that your biggest issue? Realistically, though, it may have been next to impossible to find that first leak, because FOX was putting a DVD of the season's first four episodes on the market the day after the premiere, meaning that the DVD was already in the hands of retailers before the episodes hit the air. The leak could've been from anyone of the stores carrying the DVD. FOX shouldn't make people like Jorge Romero the scapegoats here. With the internet the way it is, there will always be guys like him, willing and eager to share exclusive media with anyone who wants it.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Source: Switched.com)
(Image Courtesy of Amazon.com)