When you think of piracy, you might think of DVDs being sold out of a trunk of a car, or behind a closed door at some shop, but rarely would you expect pirated movies to be displayed and offered up so openly especially in the middle of a mall, right? According to a report from TorrentFreak, that’s what you might expect should you ever go to a mall in Ethiopia.The report claims that a reader submitted a photo of what appears to be a kiosk inside a mall in Ethiopia which looks like an ATM. However instead of dispensing cash, this machine will dispense pirated movies. All you have to do is plug in a USB drive, browse for the movie that you want, select it and pay for it, and it will be copied onto your USB drive right there and then.
According to TorrentFreak’s source, “At first I assumed these movies had their rights lifted or something because well, you know, but then I later found out that the movies I had first seen were just there on release day. Apparently the maintenance guy torrents all day and stores the data on his drive, the drive shown by the SwiftMedia monitor. This would not have been a big deal as this is Ethiopia and the allegedly democratic government has bigger issues.”
That being said, open piracy isn’t exactly uncommon in some parts of the world. For example in Asia it wouldn’t really be that uncommon to see shops inside of malls openly and brazenly offering up clearly pirated movies and TV shows, although we have to say that this is pretty next-level.
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