After recently returning to Germany, the country of my birth after teaching media studies for seven years in Asia – first in the Philippines, then in Cambodia – I was slapped with two Abmahnungen in a month. An Abmahnung is a written warning in the German judicial system, similar to the “cease and desist” letter used in the Anglo-Saxon world: a formal request by one person, usually a lawyer, to another person to immediately stop a certain behavior. In my case, the undesirable behavior was the downloading and sharing of two movies: Carnage (2011) by Roman Polanski and Merantau (2009), a martial arts movie by Welsh director Gareth Evans set in Indonesia.

That this could happen to me – a media critic who has done research on piracy for a decade – is a major embarrassment. Of course, I was aware of the fact that film studios and distributors – in Germany as well as elsewhere – had started to hire law firms and specialized companies to track down Internet users who shared files thought to be the intellectual property of these companies. As part of my research I had read about these goings on in the West, even though I was in Cambodia, where none of this mattered to anyone: copyrighted DVDs were (and still are) widely available on the markets, new films could be bought shortly after (or even before) they were released in their respective home markets, and monitoring the downloading of music and movies by net surfers had not occurred to anyone.

There were two reasons, why I was caught: First, I always assumed that the films I typically downloaded and shared were so arcane that nobody would ever bother to look for offenders. Turned out that I had one (and only one) film on my hard disk that was “intellectual property” of, among others, a major Hollywood studio: Roman Polanski's Carnage (2011), coproduced by Wild Bunch from the US and Constantin from Germany, plus a number of other companies that shared the costs of making a film by a director who himself at this time was the subject of criminal prosecution because of his alleged affair with a minor.