A 21-year-old Sydney man who illegally filmed The Simpsons Movie using his mobile phone and uploaded it to the Internet may face up to five years in prison.

The  man illegally filmed the movie on July 26, and is said to have been the first to upload it to the Internet.

“Whenever a movie is released investigators are trawling the Internet looking to take down illegal copies,” Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

According to Pecotic, the pirated Simpsons movie was removed within two hours. However, in that time it was downloaded 3000 times, and then spread to BitTorrent and other file sharing networks, where it was downloaded more than 110,000 times.

Pecotic said that Australian police have attended seven incidents in the past six weeks where cinema goers were trying to illegally film movies. More than half were using mobile phones.

The man was charged by Australian Federal Police with copyright infringement, who acted after receiving information from 20th Century Fox in the US. The man is due to appear in court on October 2.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 10:31 am under Internet.