Movieland

» see movieland.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Movieland was American at the billing layer, and the billing layer decided who it could actually hurt. The demand ended in a US credit card. The customer service line was a 900 number that charged $34.95 the second it connected, which is a piece of telephone billing that only exists on an American phone bill. Outside that country the pop-up was a nuisance with no way to finish itself, and the only people who could complain about it to anyone with power were the ones inside it.

The business was registered in California as Digital Enterprises and sold subscription movie downloads through movieland.com, with popcorn.net and moviepass.tv running the same product under other names. It started around 2005. Nothing about the catalog mattered to anybody, including the people who ran it.

What mattered was the software, distributed as MediaPipe and arriving bundled with screensavers and small utilities. Once it was on the machine it produced a window nearly a minute long, with audio, that could not be closed or minimized, and it came back more often the longer the bill went unpaid. It asked for $29.95, and in some versions as much as $99, to make itself stop.

~ the dossier ~

~ the mechanism ~

The legal design was the interesting part. The pop-up did not accuse you of piracy or infection. It said you had signed up for a three day free trial that required no credit card and no personal details, and that your license had expired. That claim did two jobs at once: it explained why a stranger was demanding money, and it turned the whole thing into a billing dispute rather than an intrusion.

Removal was routed back into payment. Users who went to the Windows control panel to uninstall were sent to a web page telling them a fee was due first, and builds that were removed successfully could reinstall themselves. For most people the choice was paying $29.95 or paying a technician more than that, which is exactly the number the price had been set against.

~ the day it stopped ~

The FTC filed in the Central District of California in August 2006, arguing deception and unfairness rather than any computer crime, because on paper the victim had agreed to everything. Washington State sued the same month and settled in April 2007 for $50,000. Interim orders that January had already forced limits on how often the windows could appear.

The consent judgment was signed by the judge on 5 September 2007, entered on the 11th, and announced on the 13th. It required $501,367.95 in consumer redress, held a judgment of $1,801,015.16 over the defendants in case their financial statements turned out to be false, banned anonymous free trials that bill you by default, and made them ship a working uninstaller and email the instructions to everyone still enrolled. The domain has answered nothing for years.

The technique did not go anywhere. Strip out the screen hijacking and what is left is a free trial that quietly becomes a paid subscription, with cancellation harder than signup, which is now a normal way to sell things. The FTC has been writing rules about that shape ever since, and losing some of them.

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