Authorities in South Africa have made their first ever arrest of an online movie pirate. The individual, said to have been identified by a hacker employed by an anti-piracy company, is reported to have uploaded a "high profile" local movie to The Pirate Bay. But with the anti-piracy outfit currently refusing to name the movie, does speculation that it's the Nelson Mandela story "Long Walk to Freedom" carry any weight?

Every minute of every day, file-sharing networks all over the globe are being monitored by anti-piracy companies on behalf of their copyright holder paymasters.

Much of the work carried out is for information gathering purposes. That data can be put to many uses by movie and music companies, including the development of marketing and lobbying strategies.

Needless to say, some of the harvested data is used to generate copyright takedowns and, on the more aggressive side of the business, to hunt down individuals engaged in piracy so that law enforcement can make an example of them.

After a week in the headlines due to the passing of Nelson Mandela, South Africa now has a brand new anti-piracy achievement to report. According to the Southern African Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT), authorities have just arrested their first ever Internet pirate.

The individual, said to have been detained in Cape Town, stands accused of uploading to The Pirate Bay. SAFACT CEO Corné Guldenpfennig told MyBroadband that his investigation team, led by a “certified ethical hacker”, were able to identify, profile and trace the uploader. This in itself is an interesting development as up until recently ISPs have refused to play ball.

“Downloaders think they can hide on the Internet. Uploaders think they can hide, but they can’t no matter how smart they think they are,” Guldenpfennig said.

As it features the first ever arrest of an online pirate in South Africa the case is interesting enough, but curiosity is only being aroused further by SAFACT’s refusal to identify the movie in question. Perhaps understandably there is speculation that for such an important case there can only be one candidate, the Nelson Mandela chronicle ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, a movie set to be launched in the U.S. on Christmas Day but already a box office sensation in South Africa.

But could that really be the case?

To find out, TorrentFreak scoured The Pirate Bay for the movie, later moving on to several other torrent indexes and scene resources for good measure. Unfortunately, searches for the movie title in both English and Afrikaans produced similarly poor results. We also searched for other top South African-produced movies released in 2013 but drew a blank there as well.

The only thing that appeared were torrents for the Mandela autobiography and audio books of the same name, items that copyright holders have been trying to take down for some time.

Interestingly the only ‘hits’ we could find for the movie were fake uploads designed to trick users into downloading malware. But while the targets here are the inexperienced, anti-piracy company IP Echelon working on behalf of Sony can’t seem to tell the difference either. Despite no sign of the movie online, they are issuing regular takedowns for fake files.

Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN are the most ‘impressive’, however, taking down more than 50 fake Long Walk to Freedom torrents in one notice and 40 in another.

The suspect in the case is due to appear in court later today, where presumably all will be revealed.