← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Happy Hacker
Thread ID: 13681 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-05-13
2004-05-13 18:30 | User Profile
[I]#1 most pirated, #1 top grossing R movie, #1 most whined about by Jewish organizations[/I]
Net Pirates Show Passion for Mel Gibson Film
LONDON (Reuters) - Mel Gibson's box office smash "The Passion of the Christ" broke the ignominious record as the most-pirated movie on Internet file-sharing networks in April, an online piracy tracking firm said on Wednesday.
The movie may have slipped out of the box office top ten in recent weeks, but its popularity among Internet users looking to score a free copy has reached a new fervor.
According to California-based BayTSP, 36,693 copies of "The Passion" were circulating on Internet file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and eDonkey. Universal Studio's "21 Grams" came in second with 32,035 pirated copies.
Hollywood officials are desperate to minimize the effects of file-sharing on their lucrative DVD business and avoid the same piracy problems that have sunk recorded music sales over the past four years.
But a variety of new file-sharing technologies such as BitTorrent are emerging regularly, and swapping large movie-sized files has become easier as more consumers subscribe to high-speed broadband connections.
DVD and VHS versions of "The Passion," which has grossed more than $375 million at the U.S. box office to date, will go on sale in August in America, said distributor 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and the filmmaker's Icon Productions.
"The Passion" was No. 3 in BayTSP's top 10 list in March with over 32,000 bootleg copies available online.
BayTSP, which counts some of the largest movie studios and music labels as its clients, deploys scouring technologies known as "spiders" to trawl the Internet looking for copyrighted copies of music and films on file-sharing services.
BayTSP said it cannot be specific about what the most traded files are, but it is able to tally how many pirated versions of copyrighted materials are in circulation online.
A company spokesman said the Pixar and Walt Disney Company animated flick "Finding Nemo" and the little-known Miramax "Shaolin Soccer" are the most pirated films online over the past year.
BayTSP said there were an average of 2.9 million daily Kazaa users and 2.2 million daily eDonkey users in April, revealing Internet movie piracy has held steady since the start of the year.
é Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.