Andy Baio has continued his excellent annual series, “Pirating the Oscars,” which tracks
each year’s Oscar nominee’s appearance on file-sharing networks, and keeps statistics
on the method by which each nominee is captured and uploaded (camcordered, ripped from
screener/pre-release cut, ripped from commercial DVD, etc). Because Andy does these stats
on an annual basis, we get a longitudinal view into the way that file-sharing is changing in response to the studios’ countermeasures, and in response to new technologies in general.
* This year, three films were leaked online within a day of their theatrical release — Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland, and Harry Potter.
* The Rabbit Hole screener was leaked online eight days before its theatrical release, while Winter’s Bone [ed: excellent film, but don’t make the mistake I made — it’s not a date-night kind of movie!] was the slowest to leak online (so far) at 125 days after its theatrical release.
* Oscar-nominated films tend to get released late in the year, but how late? More nominated films have been released on December 25 than any other day, but the median date is October 20.
* For the first year, the first high-quality leak of a film — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — was a PPV rip, most likely from a hotel’s new movie releases on pay-per-view.
* Retail Blu-Ray rips are now frequently being leaked online now before retail DVDs, so I’ve modified the “Retail DVD” column to include them.
