We finally know who made that iconic anti-piracy ad

Anyone who watched a DVD in the mid-2000s will remember being lectured about how “You Wouldn't Steal a Car” while a heavy guitar riff, grungy graphics and edgy editing made illegally downloading movies look a lot more exhilarating than it was for anyone still on a dial-up internet connection.

Famously comparing downloading movies to stealing cars and handbags, the Federation Against Copyright Theft and Motion Picture Association of America's pounding pre-movie public service announcement became iconic. It inspired memes and parodies long after its time. But the world knew very little about how it was made.

Interest resurfaced this year when it was suggested that the font used for the You Wouldn't Steal a Car text was itself stolen, but still the identity of the creatives behind the ad remained a mystery. Until now. After a months-long investigation, a pair of journalists reveal all in the video below.

No one knows who made this anti-piracy ad (until now) - YouTube

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Over two decades after the Piracy, It's a Crime ad was launched in 2004, the French journalists Nicolas Delage and Christophe Wilson set out to finally identify the creative team behind it. The task wasn't easy.

Facial recognition tech proved to be no use for identifying the actors, nor could the journalists identify posters that appear in the spot. But the investigation took a leap forward when a reverse image search revealed one of the shooting locations to be the Paramount Backlot in Los Angeles, as seen in Vanilla Sky and Charmed. The journalists also noted the ad's resemblance to the opening credits of La Femme Nikita.

From there, they traced the project back to several former members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA). After a journey that took in the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film and a series of Zoom interviews with former MPA executives, they made a stunning discovery.

The video, officially called Downloader was made by one of Hollywood’s biggest studios. Warner Bros volunteered to produce the piece through its in-house creative department The Idea Place.

In the documentary on YouTube, Nicolas manages to speak to the department's creative director Ricky Mintz, who says he never imagined the advert would see such wide distribution and become such a cultural cornerstone.

“When we made that video, I thought it would play in theaters for a week, maybe,” said Ricky Mintz, the ad’s creator. “In a million years, I never would have imagined it would end up on almost every DVD in the 2000s.”

Scott Ellman, the graphic designer who worked on the project, explains that it was decided after shooting to make the ad grittier, almost like a rock video, giving it the characteristically early 2000s look.

And the font? Nicolas finds no evidence to suggest that it was anything other than officially licensed FF Confidential, created in 1992 by the Dutch type designer Just van Rossum and now sold by MyFonts by Monotype

He points out that an archived website that was found to be using an unlicensed clone of the font belonged to an unrelated campaign with a similar name (see our pick of the best typewriter fonts for more options).