It’s just another abysmal occurrence of online piracy; only a week ago the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced and nearly 95 per cent of the movies nominated for an Oscar, many of which are still in theaters, are available to download illegally on rogue sites.
TorrentFreak is describing the level of leaking as “unprecedented”, and most of the rips seem to come from screener copies of these films handed out to judges for the Academy Awards.
TorrentFreak claims that 34 out of the 36 films up for an award this year, excluding documentaries and foreign films, are readily available on filesharing hubs. Only the animated movie Song of The Sea from Cartoon Saloon and the best original song nominee Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me are yet to find their way online one way or another. Some of these copies are from theater recordings, but many have been ripped directly from a quality digital source.
Among the most popular downloads, currently attracting more than two million downloads every week, is The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (which is up for a sound editing Oscar). The Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything has also proved popular with downloaders.
It certainly is a gloomy picture for the studios and the people who work on these movies -despite the arrival of low-cost, all-you-can-watch streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, online piracy remains a huge issue. What will be even more infuriating to industry executives is that most of these leaks appear to come from inside the Academy: “Nearly all of the pirated screener copies appear to have been leaked from Academy sources,” reveals TorrentFreak in its comprehensive breakdown.
The 87th Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, 22 February in LA and broadcast from 7:00 pm ET, with Neil Patrick Harris hosting. In terms of overall nominations, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Boyhood and American Sniper are the movies leading the way.
