The Oscars of piracy
On March 27, one of the big events of the year will take place – the live broadcast of the Oscars ceremony. As you read the many articles available online, you realize you haven't seen all the nominated films …
A film lover, you know how much money piracy costs the film industry. You read this article only recently, so you know that in the United States alone, online piracy costs $29.2 billion and 230,000 jobs every year.
Unfortunately, for some of these films, no legal offer exists in your country and so you tell yourself you have no choice.
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If you really want to see the films nominated for and awarded Oscars, you will have to pirate them… You spend less time finding an illegal copy than you spent checking whether a legal offer existed.
A simple Google search was enough to find your film. Slightly guilty, a few minutes later you settle in front of an excellent-quality pirated copy – a far cry from the “camcording” of the early years of piracy – and start watching a pirated film for the very first time in your life.
An Oscar win, 10 times more piracy
Piracy around the Oscars is not a new phenomenon. But the Covid-19 pandemic has made it grow to an extraordinary scale, and the bad habits formed while cinemas were closed seem hard to lose.
The site TorrentFreak has looked at illegal downloads during Oscar season since 2015.
Each year, they monitor the activity of the nominated films on pirate networks.
Download spikes for the films occur at two very specific moments
- At the time of the nominations
- At the time of the awards ceremony
The Spider-Man case
The British BAFTA ceremony takes place about two weeks before the Oscars, and it is known for its strong influence on the Oscars jury. This year, the film Spider-Man: No Way Home was not selected to compete at the BAFTAs. The reason? It did not meet the eligibility criteria.
One of these criteria was indeed to make the film available on the streaming platform dedicated to the ceremony, out of fear of piracy of the flagship blockbuster. This shows that this explosion of piracy at awards time is starting to be well known. It did not, by the way, stop illegal copies of the film from turning up on the networks…
Camcording and DVD screeners
There are two ways to make a film that has not yet been released accessible.
- The increasingly archaic method of camcording, in which a person invited to a preview films the screen with a personal camera. The quality of these videos is generally poor, and many pirates wait for the film to be released in better quality before downloading it.
- “Screeners” – copies given to the members of an awards jury so they can watch the films at home and then vote. These are good-quality copies, in higher demand among pirates.
While screener leaks are increasingly rare, this does not mean films are pirated less – simply that pirates use other techniques, relying in particular on releases on streaming platforms.
The Power of the Dog, a victim of its own success
For example, the film “The Power of the Dog” with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst received 12 nominations this year. The film was released in theatres on December 1, but as early as last September, it had been the victim of an enormous leak on the networks – probably following the premiere held at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The phenomenon is known and accepted, and the well-known tech blogger Andy Baio regularly updates his spreadsheet of statistics on the piracy of nominated films. The figure to remember from this impressive list of nearly 700 films across the last 20 editions of the Oscars? For 2022, the answer to “is there a high-quality leak before Oscar night?” is yes. For all 31 films of 2022.
Two pirate groups are known for their ability to get hold of and distribute this content: Hive-CM8 (which has leaked several films in competition for the Oscars) and TOPKEK.
For the moment, the studios have found no way to prevent these films from being released illegally on the networks. All that can be done is to carry out round-the-clock monitoring and remove the first copies as soon as they appear, in order to keep the situation under control. The faster the illegal copy is spotted, the less likely it is to spread exponentially.
To do this, call on a team of experts with years of experience in the field and the right tools.
Next week, join us for our two-part study on identity theft, a phenomenon more common than people think, and one we need to learn to protect ourselves against.
