I may spend a lot of time complaining about the ridiculously overreaching laws pushed by the copyright industry such as SOPA and DEACT, but that does not mean that I don’t see piracy as a major problem facing the content industries. My issues with those industries is the amount of time and money they spend on lobbying our lawmakers and suing potential customers rather than trying to create profit-making alternatives.
The sheer scale of copyright infringement on the internet certainly demonstrates a market for music and movies, but those industries need to open up their catalogues to entrepreneurs that can offer paid alternatives that are so much better than the infringing route that they are worth paying for. Spotify has moved many previous pirates to a paid platform, and Netflix has done a similar thing for movies – but if they had real competition then piracy would be even further decimated.
Netflix, in fact, is likely part of the reason that the number of downloads of the top 10 most pirated films was down from 92,480,000 in 2010 (with Avatar being downloaded over 16.5 million times alone) to 74,880,000 in 2011 – a decline of nearly 20%. It may also be true that the decline in downloads for those top 10 films is due to the mainstream Hollywood films being rather disappointing this year – although the independents have certainly taken up the slack!
Anyway, thanks go to TorrentFreak for doing the leg work in putting together this list:
| Rank | Movie | Downloads | Worldwide Gross |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fast Five | 9,260,000 | $626,137,675 |
| 2 | The Hangover II | 8,840,000 | $581,464,305 |
| 3 | Thor | 8,330,000 | $449,326,618 |
| 4 | Source Code | 7,910,000 | $123,278,618 |
| 5 | I Am Number Four | 7,670,000 | $144,500,437 |
| 6 | Sucker Punch | 7,200,000 | $89,792,502 |
| 7 | 127 Hours | 6,910,000 | $60,738,797 |
| 8 | Rango | 6,480,000 | $245,155,348 |
| 9 | The King’s Speech | 6,250,000 | $414,211,549 |
| 10 | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 | 6,030,000 | $1,328,111,219 |
Pingback: Most Pirated Games 2011 | TechFruit