When spamming thieves pose as online banks and e-mail services in order to collect personal information about people, it’s an illegal practice called called phising. When film producers use fake sites to fraudulently collect information from people who want to download their movie, they claim it’s done in the sake of the law. It still sounds illegal to me:

HARVEY Weinstein tried to take the bull by the horns when “SiCKO,” Michael Moore’s documentary on the health care system, leaked onto the Internet, allowing people to illegally download and view it for free instead of waiting to pay $8 when the flick hits theaters June 29. “I hired Kroll Securities, and we started flooding the zone,” Weinstein crowed to us. “We created lots of phony sites, and people had to input their private information to gain access to ‘SiCKO.’ We are turning over all the information to the police and prosecutors and are stopping Internet piracy.” Weinstein is right to be taking the piracy threat seriously. His company’s latest high-profile flicks, “Grindhouse,” “Factory Girl” and “Miss Potter,” all bombed at the box office, and he needs “SiCKO” to be a hit.

[From Page Six]

Sicko has received rave reviews even from outlets that would typically criticize Moore, like Fox News. Critics say that it’s the muckraker documentarian’s best film yet and that he lets the subject matter speak for itself. The healthcare crisis is huge in America and this film is overdue. I know I paid over $500 a month as a single person for health care while I lived in the states and that the cost when I had a child and husband was around $1300!

A lot of middle class working people can’t afford health coverage and just one extended illness or minor medical emergency can lead to bankruptcy. People without insurance pay more for emergency room visits, sometimes over twice as much, as people with coverage and are not given the special rates that are brokered with the insurance agencies.

Just because Moore put out a great film doesn’t mean they can phish to find people’s personal information, though. You would think that they would want more people to see the film and wouldn’t go after downloaders so aggressively.

I’m not saying that downloading films is right, just that spoofing sites and turning people in – isn’t.

Pictures of Michael Moore at the SiCKO premiere in NY last night from WENN.