Possible Fortunes in Piracy

With piracy changing the way that any company producing a product in digital form are doing business, head of companies are anything but scared to step forward and announce how “upset” or “disappointed” they are with the turn out, and how piracy is ruining their company and the prospects of future projects.  The recent movie Zombieland was a blockbuster hit when it hit the theaters the 2nd of October.  However with recent torrent activity, ripped versions of the movie ended up on torrent sites, and led it to become on of Torrent Freaks top 10 downloaded movies.  The creator of Zombieland had this to say to Torrent Freak, “However, unlike the makers of Ink, Reese is not pleased with this achievement, claiming that this piracy disaster may very well prevent a Zombieland sequel from being shot. “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2.”

However, while there is a never ending supply of people in the industry that think this way about piracy, there are a group of people out there that embrace piracy, and in doing so have seemed to come out on top.  The recently released movie Ink ended up on Torrent Freaks Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent at number 4.  Having over 400,000 people downloading and sharing the movie in the first week of its release, gave the movie unforeseen media and hype about the movie leading to increased revenue at the box office.  The creators of the film say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.”  With more unknown and less hyped movies gaining momentum through torrent sites, it seems to be doing some good, in an industry where piracy is looked at as evil.  One has to think about relaying this thought process to other forms of media, such as the current music crisis.  Recent examples such as Radiohead’s newest release, In Rainbows, was released free on the web and accepted donations, and because of this the record did better than anyone could have expected.  Having 1.2 million visitors on the Radiohead’s page in the first day of the release, and having 38% of visitors pay for the album when it was offered for any price, even for free.  We all have to take time and look at the changing of technology, and the changing of times and realize that nothing is going to stay the same forever.  The music industry as well as the movie industry have to change the way they do business, because the world around them is changing.  There is money to be made in piracy, we just need creative open minded thinkers to show us how.