The US Dept. of Justice and the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement are continuing their aggressive crackdown on copyright-infringing websites.
“Operation: In Our Sites” (as the joint effort is known) not only targets software, music, film and television offenders, but also online purveyors of counterfeit designer merchandise -- all of whom are getting their domain names seized.
So far over 100 domain names have been seized, which doesn’t mean much because their IP address remains intact, so they just continue operations under a new name.
For example, the domain “Re1ease.net” was seized in a recent crackdown and was back up in a week as “Scrrls.net." Same site, it just needed a new name. It would be like the government seizing Countrywide’s name and trademark, but allowing them to stay in business and continue ripping people off.
On a similar front, Voltage Pictures (the prominent foreign sales company and Oscar-winning producer of "The Hurt Locker") has taken a much more direct approach to tackling piracy: Voltage has filed a direct lawsuit against a handful of named illegal downloaders of “Hurt Locker,” as well as up to 5,000 yet-to-be-identified illegal downloaders.
Kudos to Voltage for tackling the problem head-on. Unfortunately, it’s going to take until 2013 to get the names of the “yet-to-be-identified” from their respective internet service providers.
I just checked The Pirate Bay (the world’s most popular public torrent site), and at present there are 85 copies of "Hurt Locker" available for download, with over a thousand active downloads in progress.
To be clear, that’s just a snapshot of one site at one moment in time. Pirate Bay doesn’t display the number of downloads-to-date, but another site does.
Presently, Demonoid displays an estimated 260,000 downloads to date (and that’s coming from the sixth most popular torrent site.) Now extrapolate that to the top 10 torrent sites! At $1 per download, that’s over $2.6m. At $5 per download, that’s over $13 million!
Back in 2006, when “Who Killed the Electric Car?” was about to be released in theaters, I was apoplectic when I saw that 20,000 people had already downloaded the entire film on YouTube.
At $8 per ticket, that was $160k in lost box office. Comparatively, that’s a drop in the bucket, next to "Hurt Locker," but it wasn’t a total loss: there was value to be found.
Taking a page from Sun-tzu ("Know your enemy and know yourself and you will always be victorious"), I have been actively following torrent sites ever since.
I’ve sampled every movie offering available: theater cameras, R5, 1080, 720, DVDs, Blue Rays, Academy screeners and more are all readily available.
If you can’t wait for VOD and don’t mind VFX that aren’t quite finished, then an Eastern European R5 version is your best bet.
If you can’t wait for the R5 and don’t mind the sound of an audience, then a camera recording of a Russian theater screen (with audio from the assisted listening port) is your best option.
