Oscars cause greater piracy

22:34, 28 February 2015

LOS ANGELES. KAZINFORM - An Irdeto study published recently showed there was a 385 percent increase in global piracy rates for Oscar nominated films. Irdeto, which specializes in helping content owners minimize the impact of piracy, monitored illegal downloading activity in over 200 countries from Jan. 1 until Feb. 14 and found that this spike and the continuing growth in popularity was a global phenomenon.

The top 10 countries excluding the US, for illegally downloading this year's Oscar nominated films are India, Russia, Italy, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands. Visitors to bit torrent sites in those countries alone accounted for over three million downloads. And, when the figures are represented in terms of number of Internet users per country, Australia has the highest concentration of illegal downloaders, followed by Italy and Greece. As for which films are the biggest hits with visitors to torrenting sites, "Selma" saw the biggest increase - 1033 percent - in downloads following its nomination for best picture, with "American Sniper" (230 percent) a distant second, Kazinform has learnt from the Arab News. However, based on sheer numbers of downloads globally, "American Sniper" is head and shoulders above the competition. It has been downloaded 1.38 million times globally since its nomination compared with just 144,075 times for "Selma." In fact, Clint Eastwood's biopic was the most commonly torrented film in 100 of the countries surveyed. If the Academy Awards would had been decided in this way, then "America Sniper" would had scooped the prize for Best Picture.

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