I told you last Wednesday about how the MPAA is paying the L.A. police department to install cameras to watch Latino movie pirates in the fashion district in downtown Los Angeles. The wire piece I linked to didn't mention that the sellers are entirely immigrants from Latin America, many of whom don't speak English and may not be in the country legally, which is an interesting element to the story that the police and MPAA are downplaying and the mainstream press is completely ignoring. Now WIRED has picked up the story and is running a really good piece on it, complete with pictures.

There's something fishy about this whole business of installing cameras there to bust movie pirates. The reason is that, as anyone who has been there knows, these transactions happen in the open air for all to see. It's not even clear that the sellers know they're breaking the law. WIRED stood there and took pictures of the goods, and my guess is nobody even cared. If the police wanted to actually bust pirates, they would just do down there with plain-clothes officers, stand there and watch the transactions, then arrest everybody. Meanwhile, the sellers there are very unlikely to complained about being surveilled.

This whole thing sounds to me like a publicity stunt by the RIAA and LAPD designed to create FUD around the idea that cameras might be watching whenever you buy bootleg DVDs from a street vendor.