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In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.These practices have been quite common in the UK and Germany for years, and in March this year the US Copyright Group imported this mass litigation “pay up or else” scheme to the United States.The initial targets were relatively unknown indie films, but this changed when the makers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker joined in. After its Oscar victory the film was downloaded by millions of BitTorrent users, and in May the filmmakers sued 5,000 of these alleged downloaders all at once.To find out whether the download rate for The Hurt Locker plummeted after the news of the lawsuit against BitTorrent users hit the mainstream media, we decided to take a look at last month’s download statistics. Interestingly, it turns out that people seem to be downloading the film undeterred. In June, the film was downloaded little over 200,000 times, which puts it in the top 25 of most downloaded movies last month. Considering that the film has been available on BitTorrent for more than a year already, this high download number is quite an achievement and only a few percent less than the previous month.Our statistics further show that 23% of all downloads come from the US, the territory where the US Copyright Group launched its legal action against BitTorrent downloaders.
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Topic: Hurt Locker Lawsuit Doesn’t Affect BitTorrent Downloads (Read 539 times)
