Pirates ahead before the Oscars

Perhaps unsurprisingly, online movie piracy shot up after the nominees for the 2015 Academy Awards were announced.

Media protection company Irdeto claimed that piracy increased by 385% worldwide. The statistics applied to BitTorrent-based piracy of films nominated for awards in the Oscars’ Best Picture category and those films whose actors or directors were nominated for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.

“Gone Girl” was the most pirated film before the nominations were announced, but then “American Sniper”, one of the nominees for Best Picture, took the lead after January 15.

This year, BBC Trending, the BBC bureau that reports on social media, claimed that it’s noticed a “surge of online chatter as high-quality copies of the leading contenders are leaked in bulk”.

Leonardo DiCaprio had a big year in 2016—the six-time Oscar nominated actor finally won the award for his performance in “The Revenant”.

It was not so much of a success for one US man, who was ordered to pay $1 million for illegally posting screener versions of “The Revenant” and “The Peanuts Movie” to a publicly accessible website.

“The Revenant” was made available for download six days before its limited release, causing Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to suffer losses of well over $1 million, said the Department of Justice.