Star Trek XI Top Pirated Movie
2 min readThe Top Ten list of the most pirated movies of 2009 has been released and Star Trek XI leads the list.
Movie and DVD sales are up this year, with more than ten billion dollars in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, but illegal downloading has also increased during 2009.
Star Trek XI leads the BitTorrent pack with almost 11 million downloads, followed by Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and RocknRolla, a latter a lesser known movie which only generated twenty-five million dollars during its release year of 2008.
The rest of the list includes:
- The Hangover
- Twilight
- District 9
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price
- State of Play
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Knowing
Piracy is not taken lightly by the studios. According to Paramount Pictures, in the months following Star Trek XI‘s release, the medical company tracked more than five million IP addresses that downloaded one of six copies of the movie recorded on camcorders, with editions in Russian, and from the Philippines, Ukraine, Spain, Germany and the U.S.
“Just five years ago, one had to be computer literate and exceedingly patient to pirate movies,” said Paramount in a recent letter to the FCC. “Today, literally anyone with an internet connection can do it. Clunky websites are being replaced by legitimate looking and legitimate feeling pirate movie websites, a perception enhanced by the presence of premium advertisers and subscription fees processed by major financial institutions.”
“The flood of stolen content currently available online, including every major theatrical film within hours of release, poses an immediate threat to the motion picture industry,” said Paramount, “which in 2007 supported two-point-five million jobs, forty-one-point-one billion dollars in wages, and had a trade surplus of thirteen-point-six billion dollars.”
Paramount and other studios will want copyright policing written into the FCC’s National Broadband Plan to stop the loss of potential revenue.
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