Man jailed for copying 'The Love Guru,' pretty much the worst movie ever

Well, that's what you get for encouraging anyone to watch "The Love Guru."

Yesterday, a California man named Jack Yates was sentenced to six months in prison for distributing a pirated copy of Mike Myers' stupendously bad 2008 comedy. Yates was an employee of Los Angeles Duplication & Broadcasting, the company hired to make promotional copies of "The Love Guru." Promo clips are shown when an actor comes on a talk show to discuss his or her latest work; this particular snippet, for instance, was destined for “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Hijinks

But Yates apparently had other plans in mind. According to prosecutors, the Porter Ranch, Calif.-man made at least one high-quality copy of "The Love Guru" and leaked it onto the World Wide Web, where it was downloaded by something like 85,000 people. Yates made the copy sometime in May, a month before the movie's release date, so it should be noted that those 85,000 people did not have access to the deadly reviews rendered upon the flick in June.

Rave reviews

For your entertainment, here's a sampling, courtesy of Metacritic:

• "This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room," raved Dana Stevens on Slate.

• "The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again," gushed The New York Times' A.O. Scott.

• "This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat," applauded The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris.

• Roger Ebert, not one to fritter away plaudits, wrote, "Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents."

• Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jan Stuart heaped on the love. "As the Maple Leafs' truculent coach Cherkov, [Verne Troyer] gets the film's final and funniest words," Stuart wrote. "That they are also of his own spontaneous invention speaks volumes about the shrinking imagination of Myers, who continues to hone his franchise empire on the belief that penis activity and the politically incorrect (bring on the midget jokes and lewd Indian surnames) is the cutting edge, if not the manifest destiny, of screen comedy."

No, but seriously folks

According to the Wall Street Journal, Paramount was satisfied with Yates' jail sentence. "[The studio] appreciates the hard work of law enforcement to get this result," a spokesman said. "We take these matters very seriously and will continue to aggressively pursue any theft of our intellectual [sic] property.”

A question: would Jack Yates would have received such a heavy sentence if he'd pirated something good? As it stands now, the man's guilty of a crime -- and of having exceptionally poor taste in film.

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