Remember the loud DVD warning?

If you bought a DVD between 2005 and 2012 you met the “Piracy. It’s a crime.” trailer. It insisted you wouldn’t steal a car, then hammered home that copying movies was the same thing, all while forcing you to sit through an un-skippable minute of flashing text and pounding techno.

It turns out the ad was doing exactly what it scolded us for.

A pirated font inside the anti-piracy brochure

The umbrella group behind the campaign handed out a glossy eight-page PDF brochure. An archived copy is still up on the Wayback Machine, and it embeds a typeface called XBAND Rough. That font is an unlicensed knock-off of FF Confidential, made by Dutch designer Just van Rossum. FontForge confirmed the match. So the anti-piracy team pirated a font in its own propaganda material (archived PDF). The irony set the Internet on fire and eventually led to fines for the rights group that commissioned the work (TorrentFreak report).

The soundtrack saga

The banger techno loop behind the trailer sounded custom made. It was not. Dutch composer Melchior Rietveldt had written the piece for a one-off local film-festival event in 2006. He got paid for that single showing. A year later he bought a Harry Potter DVD and heard his own track playing under the same anti-piracy clip. The music had been pressed onto at least 71 commercial releases worldwide without permission.

In 2007, DVDs were still selling good, with top titles selling in tens of millions. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix alone shipped close to ten million units in the United States alone (Wikipedia stats). That ad ran on at least 71 different commercial discs, so Rietveldt’s track was pressed onto millions and millions of copies without his say-so.

Rietveldt spent five years chasing royalties through the Dutch collecting society Buma/Stemra. Internal emails stalled, token advances showed up late, and a board member even offered to buy the track for a million euros while pocketing one-third for “administration”. The composer recorded that call, the board member resigned, and in 2012 a court finally ordered Buma/Stemra to pay up and cover legal bills (ABC science write-up, Wikipedia page).

Nothing new under the sun

Arguments over copying did not start with DVDs. Britain’s 1710 Statute of Queen Anne opened by complaining that printers had been “taking the liberty of printing books… without the consent of the authors, to the ruin of them and their families.” Three centuries later companies still preach that message, sometimes while ignoring it themselves.

Fonts and music sound small next to blockbuster budgets, yet they show how easy it is to overlook creative labour. The campaign wanted moral clarity, but its own paperwork and audio track tell a messier human story. Creators rely on contracts, collecting societies, and good faith. All three failed here. Viewers learned that piracy is wrong. They also learned, perhaps subconsciously, that the people shouting the loudest do not always practice what they preach.

TLDR

The “You wouldn’t steal a car” DVDs stole a font and a soundtrack. The brochure’s typeface was an unlicensed clone, and the techno backing track was pressed onto dozens of discs without paying the composer. After years of legal wrangling the rights groups behind the ad were forced to settle, proving that even anti-piracy crusades can end up committing piracy themselves.