Australian authorities have announced that they have arrested a man believed to be responsible for leaking The Simpsons Movie to the 'Net. A Sydney-area man is alleged to have used a mobile phone to record the film in a theater on the day of its release, which he then uploaded hours later, beating the street date for the movie throughout much of the world.

The low-quality copy, which hit the wires a few hours before the movie's official release in the United States, was widely reported in the media as a threat to the much-anticipated Simpsons release. Despite the gloom and doom, the movie's opening weekend smashed expectations, much to the chagrin of elements in the industry who would have liked to point to a poor debut as a sign of the evil effects of piracy. There were fears that the Simpsons were played out, but the movie did far better than expected.

Quick, but not quick enough

The raid was the result of joint teamwork between the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Twentieth Century Fox (Fox). The three had also worked together to track the source of the film leak back in July, but found that by the time they could do anything about it, it was too late.

"Within 72 hours of making and uploading this unauthorized recording, AFACT had tracked it to other streaming sites and P2P systems where it had been illegally downloaded in excess of 110,000 times and in all probability, copied and sold as a pirate DVD all over the world," said Adrianne Pecotic, the executive director of AFACT, in a statement.

As it turns out, AFACT got a heads-up from Fox, which was monitoring P2P networks in search of the first Simpsons movie uploads. Yet even with this monitoring, it was too late to stop the leaks. AFACT said that in the short time it took to identify the leak, it had rapidly spread to other sites, and investigators even learned that it was rapidly re-edited into a French language version and also transcoded into other formats and distributed via BitTorrent sites by two "organized release groups which facilitate file-sharing."

Hence, the "speedy removal" of the movie "within 72 hours of it being posted on the internet" was no removal at all, for the movie spread too fast. Once the cat's out of the bag, there's no putting it back in. Once copied, it cannot be "removed" from the Internet.

The identity of the man accused of recording and uploading the film has not been released, but he is expected to appear in court in early October. There is no word on how AFACT tracked the upload to the man in question, but given that the group believes it has found the source web site, it was likely a simple IP address-based identification.