Cinematical

In a story that I'm still having a hard time believing, the Motion Picture Association of America yesterday introduced its newest weapons in the battle against illegal movie piracy ... two dogs.

Yes folks, I kid you not, but the two highly trained black Labradors, named "Lucky" and "Flo" (why not "Hustle" and "Flo"?) spent eight months in Ireland learning how to smell DVDs. According to the story, they can smell any DVDs, not just pirated ones, which sort of begs the question, "why?" Apparently they will be used to smell large containers that enter the U.S., to find out if there are unregistered or illegal DVDs inside. Unfortunately, they can't be used in the battle against downloading movies, since they can't smell digital piracy. I guess justice has no scent.

MPAA President Dan Glickman said, "Obviously, you need a volume of dogs to be effective. The idea right now is to demonstrate their abilities to show that it can be done and maybe build a corps." A corps of legal and illegal DVD sniffing dogs. I think this bears repeating, even though this is only text, and you're reading it, and not hearing my voice. A corps of DVD sniffing dogs.



One can only pray that we won't have to sit through segments before the trailers at the movies featuring these dogs in action. Worse still would be an animated version of Lucky and Flo, warning kids not to buy their discs from Singapore. "D.V. Dog says, piracy makes it rrrrruff for all of us!" Chomp on bad disc. Good grief, I hope I didn't just give the MPAA ideas.

I still think they're really missing out by not training ferrets for this type of operation, solely for the headline grabbing "MPAA Agents "Ferret Out" DVD Pirates." Come on, that's box office gold right there.