At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers
Found on New York Times on Friday, 27 April 2012
“Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004.
Well MPAA, here is your chance to show that justice is blind. You have dragged old people to court before, you have caused mothers to lose everything for downloading a few movies for personal use. Big Hy admits bootlegging hundreds of thousands of movies, causing by your calculations probably trillions of damage to your business; not to mention the thousands of jobs that were lost because of him. So go ahead, sue him. Sue a 92 year old WW2 veteran who has several thousand soldiers standing behind him. You cannot let this one slip for PR reasons since you never cared about bad PR, right?