MPAA Helped Police Seize 'Pirated' DVDs That Were Actually Fully Authorized | Techdirt

Here's a story that touches on a few different issues of importance around these parts. We'll get to the details of the legal ruling in a bit, but the background is really the key part. At the beginning of 2009, a company in Valencia, California, called L&M Optical Disc West, received an order from an authorized partner of the producers of the film Milk to manufacture the DVDs of the film. They began doing exactly that. On February 2nd, as part of a supposedly unrelated police raid, police saw those DVDs and found them "suspicious." They rang up the MPAA who sent over an "investigator," who falsely declared that the DVDs were unauthorized, leading the police to seize them (though, oddly, allowing the private investigation firm to hold them) and to declare to the press that they had found "pirated" DVDs of Milk. This happened despite multiple attempts by L&M staff to explain that they had a legitimate order, even offering to show the "investigator" the details of the order.