Monday, January 4, 2010

Pirates Plunder Paramount Pictures

Cover of "Star Trek"Cover of Star Trek
Paramount Pictures' 2009 twin box-office killings: Star Trek, featuring Chris Pines' star-making turn as Capt. James T. Kirk, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, featuring Megan Fox' mechanical acting, topped the list of films most purloined by online pirates, according to TorrentFreak, a file-sharing tracking company.

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek grossed $258 million, while Michael Bay's Transformers sequel netted $402 million in domestic box office receipts for Viacom-owned Paramount, but pilferers preferred the former, illegally downloading the film "where no man has gone before" just under 11 million times, compared to 10.6 million pirated copies of Transformers, TorrentFreak estimates.

The 2009 entries in the wizard Harry Potter and vampire Twilight series also were among the top 10 bootlegged movies. The movie industry worldwide is believed to lose about $18 billion in revenues internationally, a third of  that in the U.S. alone, because of film piracy.

"TUOL" wonders if more adult fare shown at independent movie houses is absent from the TorrentFreak list because the audience for such films is more principled and law-abiding, or if the pirates are just unwilling to risk jail time for such a shrinking audience.
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1 comment:

  1. It's ashame Sheldon that the movie industry seems little bothered about catching the pirates that get their hands on the movies before they have even been mastered to DVD, if they invested the money in the technology that was a deterent to the theives then less movies would be available before the DVD/BD release. This is not to say that piracy would be cut, the only way that will happen is when the studios reduce the costs to a realistic mass-consumer price even then it won't stop them when torrents and usenets are around.

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