Pirated Film Director: “Exposure Unquestionably a Positive Thing”

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87220/pirated-film-director-exposure-unquestionably-a-positive-thing/

Many of us BitTorrent users are well aware that at best there’s a casual relationship between availability on tracker sites and box office ticket sales.

For example, The Dark Knight, despite becoming last year’s most pirated movie, also earned more than $1 billion USD worldwide.
For Indie movie producers, much like up and coming music artists, BitTorrent’s potential is enormous, giving them a worldwide audience and exposure with only the cost of a few mouse clicks.

Enter the movie Ink.
Over this past weekend the movie was “ripped off” and uploaded to several BitTorrent tracker sites. While knowing that it would happen eventually, what they didn’t expect was the speed with which the movie would “blow up” afterwards. It’s currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

Ink’s writer and director are both pleased with the turn of events. Though obviously not “excited that people are seeing the film without paying” they are definitely enjoying the “enormous amount of exposure” that availability on BitTorrent has given them.

Yesterday they sent an email to those involved in the project, acknowledging what happened, and also emphasizing their happiness with how piracy has given them “unprecedented exposure.”

It reads:

Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure. As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Jamin and Kiowa Double Edge Films

The letter belies the usual MPAA line that one illegal download equals one lost sale and that file-sharing services and applications have no useful purpose and should be throttled by ISPs.

Ink is just but another example of how P2P can put content in the hands of fans where it belongs and I think Jamin and Kiowa would agree.

That makes a refreshing change.