Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Most Pirated Movies on the Internet

Recently in class we have discussed pirating movies, and downloading music on the internet. Students in class talked about the ways in which they purchased their music and movies, and whether they downloaded illegally, or purchase on Itunes. Torrent was the downloading service that seemed to be the most popular among the students in our class.

I found an interesting article that listed the most pirated movies on the internet and was surprised to see some of the movies on the list:

1. Avatar: 21 million downloads
2. The Dark Knight: 19 million downloads
3. Transformers: 19 million downloads
4. Inception: 18 million downloads
5. The Hangover: 17 million downloads
6. Star Trek: 16 million downloads
7. Kick-Ass: 15 million downloads
8. The Departed: 14 million downloads
9. The Incredible Hulk: 14 million downloads
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: 14 million downloads

This report was created by TorrentFreak a blog that tracks the downloads on the leading downloading site BitTorrent. It is clear that box-office hits are the movies that are most frequently downloaded, but I was shocked by some of the movies on this list such as The Hangover. I personally believe The Hangover is a movie targeted towards a particular demographic and was surprised to see that it was the 5th most pirated movie.

Could you imagine the increase in profits directors such as James Cameron would receive if the 21 million downloads, was instead 21 million purchases?

Article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/digital-culture/social-networking/the-most-pirated-movies-on-the-internet/article2209239/ 

-  
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. J MACNovember 18, 2011 at 8:02 AM

    Hey Julia,

    This is a very interesting blog post. It's evident that downloading movies has become popular and these numbers seem shocking, but I'm assuming this data doesn't even include users who stream movies!

    I'm sure directors like James Cameron would be disappointed to see that they have lost a huge percentage of their profit to illegal downloading. However, it goes back to the point how much are you willing to pay to download and which artist/actors/directors are you willing to support?

    Most itunes users were accustomed to paying a 99 cent download fee for songs, but when itunes bumped up the price to $1.29 they lost a huge following of customers who previously paid for their music.

    I personally believe that artists should be supported but to a certain extent- I make a conscience effort to support and legally purchase music from up and coming artist, but at what point does it become too much?

    As I mentioned, I am sure James Cameron is disappointed to loose millions through illegal downloading, but does he really need they money from the extra sales.

    Maybe the reward is not in the profits, but it should be measured by a non-monetary measure of his contribution to media and pop culture?
    Should he be happy his work has reached mass audiences because they access, or upset because his work is floating around in cyber space for free?

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)