Oscar Leaks Popular on BitTorrent

Oscar nominees for 2013, including Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, appeared to be hits on BitTorrent, accounting for over 2 million downloads.




As usual, DVD screeners are only offered to some members of the Academy, and the film industry is trying hard to keep them from leaking onto the web. However, the screeners somehow manage to reach the masses in the form of DVDSCR. In the end of last year, Jayne Mansfield’s Car, Citadel and The Sweeney leaked onto the Internet for free download as well. They were followed this Christmas by The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Flight, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which have appeared on file-sharing networks, along with James Bond’s latest adventures in Skyfall. All the movies leaked in the form of DVD screeners.

The start of this year was marked with leaks for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which instantly became a huge hit amongst file-sharers. The statistics say that the film accounted for at least 2,000,000 downloads within the first week of 2013. In just 3 days after The Hobbit, Zero Dark Thirty and Hitchcock leak onto the web as well. Unsurprisingly enough, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained also became a huge hit on P2P networks. The latter leaked on the 5th of January and was downloaded at least 500,000 times that day. You can search the web and find illegal copies of Anna Karenina, The Sessions, Celeste & Jesse Forever, West of Memphis, and Hyde Park on Hudson. It seems that the efforts of the entertainment industry to prevent quality copies of their products from leaking online have largely been fruitless.