An IT employee and a contractor working at Fox Entertainment Group have been dismissed after it was discovered that they had been using the office network as a warez server, hosting illegal copies of movies and software for downloading by others.

Daredevil, The Matrix Reloaded and X2: X-Men United were among 14 movies – not all Fox movies – that Rupert Murdoch's media company was unwittingly hosting on its computers.

Federal authorities were alerted by Fox and traced access to the server to IT department employee Lisa Yamamoto. It appeared that she and other members of a warez group were accessing the files, according to an affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun web site.

Warez is a term commonly applied by software pirates to files which have been made available on the internet for downloading and, if necessary, stripped of their copy protection.

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