The 2010 Academy Awards are being held tonight, and Avatar and The Hurt Locker are the front-runners for the coveted ‘Best Picture’ Oscar. But both are beaten by District 9, at least if the number of downloaded torrents is the deciding factor.
Movie Piracy
Movie piracy has been with us for decades. The advent of home video made piracy a huge problem for Hollywood, and DVD and Blu-ray have continued that trend. But it’s the Internet that truly made piracy mainstream and something everyone does.
That is if you believe sharing media files on the Internet is piracy, of course. The law says it is, naturally.
File-sharing sites are probably more numerous now than ever before, with both well-known and underground options available to anyone who wants to acquire a media file – be it movie, TV show, game, computer program, or whatever – for free online.
And The Piracy Oscar Goes To…
recently compiled data pertaining to the ten movies nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the 2010 Academy Awards. The real winner of the Oscar is expected to come from Avatar and The Hurt Locker. And yet these two films play second (and third) fiddle to District 9 in the piracy stakes.
TorrentFreak’s Piracy Oscars
1. District 9 – 12,639,000
2. Avatar – 11,326,000
3. The Hurt Locker – 7,930,000
4. Up – 5,437,000
5. Inglourious Basterds – 5,376,000
6. Precious – 4,922,000
7. Up In The Air – 4,855,000
8. A Serious Man – 3,836,000
9. The Blind Side – 1,845,000
10. An Education – 683,000
It’s important to note that these films range in age considerably, and so high quality torrents have been available to download for varying lengths of time. Had they all been available for the same length of time then Avatar would undoubtedly take the number one spot.
Hollywood’s Fightback
Hollywood, the movie studios, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have collectively tried to nip movie piracy on the Web in the bud. And they must have thought they were getting somewhere when they won their case against The Pirate Bay.
But nothing has really changed. The Pirate Bay as merely one conduit for movie piracy. And there are plenty of other options open to people willing to break the law and download movies online.
Conclusions
The point is that Hollywood hasn’t yet got a handle on Internet piracy. It isn’t going anywhere, whatever efforts are made to that end.
The key for the movie studios is to both utilize the technology to their own advantage and make sure there are legal, low-cost alternatives which could help discourage people from taking this route. Until then, all the Oscar hopefuls will be heavily-pirated ad infinitum.
But as the $2 billion box-office takings of Avatar prove, it’s not like Internet piracy is really harming Hollywood anyway.
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