I believe you are incorrect about the theater owners - SONY pulled the film and even if they had not they would have been just as liable because they were aware of the threat.

Sony Statement At Obama: Interview Release On Other Platforms - Business Insider


An excerpt from Sony's statement: "The decision not to move forward with the December 25 theatrical release of 'The Interview' was made as a result of the majority of the nation's theater owners choosing not to screen the film. This was their decision".

Read the statement in its entirety in the above link.

I like your thinking. I would like to view The Interview to see what kind of portrayal it has of the North Korean leader.

Sony, the movie distributors and others were probably persuaded by their legal departments to cave into liability concerns.

What we're missing at the movie theaters due to Kim Jong-un's hostile censorship: The Interview's Trailer #2. I'm not sure it's a movie I'd normally see, but now it's the principle of the thing which has me defending The Interview.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=frsvWVEHowg

Exactly.
However if I was at Sony making the decision, I would have made the movie and slightly altered the names and places as is quite often done in satire. (mostly to avoid law suits) Everyone knows who it is really about but ones but is so to speak covered.
I can't help but wonder if someone at Sony will leak the movie to the internet. Then we can all download it and North Korea can go to.....

I also think we need to invest serious money in cyber security development. As it doesn't directly affect the bottom line there has been little money in it so not a lot of development over the past few years. Look at any of the software providers and their security suite division is not one of their larger departments.

Protecting our credit our banks and our infrastructure is a matter of national defense and bucks need to be spent.

Originally the movie Olympus Has Fallen was about a Chinese attack on the White House but was changed to a North Korean attack. I guess the studio didn't want to offend the Chinese. The North Koreans were portrayed as brutal murderers, and I don't remember any blow back from that.

It doesn't matter what something is about. Movies are fiction usually. This was meant as a satire, but even if it were a documentary, No foreign power has a right to tell us, the people of the U.S., what we can see at the movies.

Remember Innocence Of Muslims? Just the trailer on YouTube caused an uproar (please no Benghazi rants).

Sony should put the movie out on the internet....would like to see North Korea hack the world! Stamp out a million dvds and have drones drop them over North Korea.:a040:

No. I don't know that movie. What was the uproar about?



EDITED....I found this information on Wikipedia about the TRAILER to Innocence of Muslims and the rioting in Egypt over it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_of_Muslims

Chi town...you often drop comments and don't say how you feel about things. What do you think about the issue of this movie, The Interview, and the hacking and the threats? I don't think I would go see a movie like this, but I don't want to be told by another country I can't.

I stand corrected - it appears the finger pointing has begun.

I just hope they don't hack into our banking system

Actually, the NK leadership is quite concerned about one item you note ... dropping DVDs of the movie into NK, strange as that may sound. We here in America sometimes have a tough time understanding how truly wacko the NKs really are, but they are brought up from birth taught that the Dear Leader is a God. Secular atheism is pretty much standard procedure for progressive regimes, but NK takes it to a world class extreme, plus couples it with a communist hereditary monarchy (an interesting oxymoron in its own right)

The NK regime is concerned that, if people who are oppressed and starving in most cases, see the Dear Leader being blown to pieces in a movie, that it might cause them to doubt his divinity and thus his legitimacy and ... so forth, such that the whole house of cards unravels. I have seen a bootleg copy of the ending and it’s hilarious … to the tune of some rock music, and in slo-mo, Kim’s helicopter is hit with a missile, he meets his Maker and the last scene is his hair on fire.

Which leads me to think … dropping DVDs of this movie all over NK is indeed a great idea.

Yes, you have that (i.e. US hack into Iranian nukes) exactly right. You see, I really do believe that by and large the US is, and has been, a force for good in the world since its Founding, and especially so since WWII. I thus ascribe to the view that we need to win, and the bad guys need to lose. It’s a simple but effective overarching strategy that has worked in the past.

I also know you likely cringe at that term evil as corny etc. but is it in fact true so I’m just calling it what it is. If you have difficulty putting the Iranian and/or North Korean regimes into the evil category, I’m looking forward to hearing your reasoning.

I also think it’s interesting that several posters have used the term “shooting war”. No one has advocated that, unless in response to a direct terror attack on the homeland and I think it that case, no one would disagree with the need for a military response

But, I think what we can see interspersed throughout this thread is the phenomenon that makes it so difficult for democracies (actually a republic) such as ours to respond to organized, state sponsored “evil,” threats, intimidation and so forth –to wit, fear.

Given the current state of our culture, most in the US simply want to be left alone to focus on jobs, family and doing our best to live the good life. Thus, when something like the Sony hack occurs, I think many people are indeed fearful. So, before proceeding, I want to set the table once more.

A communist wacko regime destroyed a US company (i.e. subsidiary) via a hack. (at this point, given Sony’s hypocrisy and making racial jokes amongst top execs etc., I personally have zero sympathy for them.) But, when NK says “ you must not show that movie or I will blow up your theaters” THAT is when it changes for me. So, my position is we simply cannot let it stand. We have to do something. (I outlined my approach on page 2 of this thread so won’t repeat it again)

Since some people are fearful, they tend to react in several ways:
• Blame the victim … i.e. it was Sony’s fault for making this horrible movie
• Sony is not really a US corporation … what’s the big deal? Plus this was their corporate decision.
• The movie was inappropriate … its’ horrible to make a movie about killing the NK dictator and it would probably lose money anyway so just as well it did not show
• Ridicule some who say we need to stand up to the NK … what do you want to do, start a shooting war? Do you want your kid going? Etc.
• We are just as bad … i.e. we hack too, so why do we get upset when the NK hack (i.e. moral equivalency)

A key lesson of history is (Chamberlain being one of the better examples) … we are better off confronting evil early on, vs waiting until we get boxed into a corner whereby we either surrender or have no choice but to get involved in a shooting war … and on a big time scale.

I’m glad the President criticized Sony for pulling the movie. That’s a start. But, I think it’s essential the Sony find a way to release the movie and on a wide scale. I also think POTUS’s call (in effect) for covert countermeasure against NK at a time and place of our choosing is exactly the correct course to take in that regard.

One final note … good for you and Mrs. Blueash getting on the plane after 9/11 … that’s another way of making my point and where you / I agree … you never give in to a bully. That’s what we have with NK now.

So to summarize: Sony … release and find a way to distribute / show the movie worldwide!!

The tech show I am watching is discussing the story. The on-line station is called This Week in Technology and has a number of technology shows. These people talk about the Politics of the situation less then the tech side.

So if you click here and read this story and then click on the links within the story and the suggested stories at the end of the story you can get a pretty good background on this story and security risks in general.

I learned from the geeks of this network the general lack of security of major companies means more of this is coming unless it is tightened. It's a new world.

Couldn't anyone with enough wealth hire Korean programmers who write code in Korean to spring the attack for them? Who knows what is true anymore? or Who did what?

Doesn't Sony have this kind of wealth?

This has all the trappings of the largest hoax pulled off of all times in order to create the biggest block buster of all time.

Of course, this is just a "what-if" but think of the possibility.

Yum, those brownies fresh from Colorado sure are tasty!