DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — blogging.la and Wired News both cover the MPAA-funded cameras in the fashion district today. They set out to find the locations of the four cameras currently in operation, and return with plenty of pictures and evidence that the presence of the cameras is having little effect on movie sales. From blogging.la:

Nothing like a photo shoot to prove the cameras are working right? The dent in the business was obvious, we could only find people selling boxes of bootleg DVDs about every 5 feet or so, I can't imagine what it was like pre-MPAA-funded-cameras.

Xeni comes through with the real moral of the story on Wired News:

Later, I watch the two DVD purchases. The Star Wars disc is awful -- it's unwatchable. It's a copy of the infamous internet work print widely available on BitTorrent. A pair of time codes stretches along the upper frame. Battle scenes and explosions that looked dizzyingly lifelike in the movie theater are cruddy and distorted.

The DVD promising to be a leaked copy of the unreleased Fantastic Four movie is actually an unmarked DVD-R that instead contains the 1994 Roger Corman version, a turkey known as one of the ultimate awful movies of all time. And this copy is of equally horrendous quality.

At $5 each, my pirated purchases are no bargain. When the real movies come out on DVD, I'll be able to buy them for about $14, and they will look great.

Hopefully these cameras are being used for more important things than copyright protection. Stopping animal sales and controlling illegal food vendors would rank up there in my books.