Great research on movie piracy
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Kudos to Los Angelino Andy Baio for putting together a fabulous review of online movie piracy since 2003. It’s mainly raw data today; Baio promised to offer some analysis on his blog, Waxy.org, tomorrow. Focusing on a slice of the film industry -- the titles that earned Academy Award nominations for their producers, actors or crew -- Baio examined how many days elapsed between the movie’s release and the availability of various bootlegged versions online. Such movies aren’t always in demand online; blockbusters seem to draw more attention from the scene than critical favorites (especially period dramas). So if anything, these titles move online more slowly than the average Hollywood film. Which is not to say that they dawdle en route to the darknet. By Baio’s calculation, this year’s Oscar nominees were bootlegged online only four days, on average, after they were released to theaters. And DVD-quality bootlegs were available online less a week after the official DVD was released to video stores or mailed to Oscar voters.
Baio’s analysis will no doubt be better than mine, but here’s my takeaway from his data. The industry’s many efforts to curb recording in theaters may have slowed bootleggers by a day or two, but they’re still pirating just about everything. ‘Across the Universe’ doesn’t seem to have been cammed, but that’s probably because no one tried, not because anyone was foiled. ‘American Gangster’ wasn’t cammed, either, because a high-quality copy of the film was available online almost two weeks before its U.S. premier.
One bright point for Hollywood is that fewer Oscar screeners were bootlegged this year than in the previous five go-arounds. On the other hand, Baio’s research suggests that the studios’ watermarks and enforcement efforts aren’t the reason. Rather, it seems that fewer screener DVDs have been sent out this season than previously. In fact, the only nominees this year that have yet to yield high-quality bootlegs are the ones that haven’t been released as screeners or commercial DVDs.
Image of the coveted Oscar statuette courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website, Oscar.org.