For the 2009 Oscars, 26 movies were nominated. In alphabetical order they are: Australia, Bolt, Changeling, Defiance, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges, Hellboy II, Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, The Duchess, The Reader, The Visitor, The Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Wall-E and Wanted.

Of these 26 movies, 25 were available online by yesterday’s nomination day – only Rachel Getting Married made the date piracy-free. An MPAA-worrying 23 of these were downloadable in either DVD Screener or Retail DVD format (Region 5 included). In the past months many of the nominees appeared in our weekly download charts, with The Dark Knight as the absolute winner topping 7 million downloads in 2008.

Of course, the MPAA is always keen to point to the ‘evils’ of camcorder piracy and has clamped down heavily on this in recent years. However, it doesn’t seem able to deal effectively with its own internal issues. Of the 26 nominated films, 20 were distributed to Oscar voters in DVD Screener format. Many of them leaked onto the web, with the exceptions countable on one hand.

In 2003 the MPAA temporarily banned Oscar screeners to prevent them from leaking, but this decision was eventually reversed. Since then, the industry has touted technical solutions such as Cinea to protect their content, but for various reasons it hasn’t stopped the leaks. This year the average time from DVD Screeners being delivered to voters and subsequently leaking out to the web, was just 6 days.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Some great statistics have now been collected by Waxy, which provides detailed piracy (leaking) data for all of the 185 Oscars nominated movies since 2003, right through to 2008′s batch. The amount of data provided is very impressive, even providing dates when a movie was leaked in cam, telesync, Region5/Telecine, DVD Screener formats.

The stats show that the average length of time before a movie leaked to the Internet (in any format, including ‘cam’) was just a single day in 2003, extending to a peak of 7 days in 2006. By 2008 the term was back to 4 days and over the 2003-2008 period, the average internet leak time was just 3 days.

From the day an official ‘Screener’ copy of the movie should’ve been available, the average time took to leak the movie back in 2003 was a completely unimpressive minus 3 days. So, 3 days before the Oscars screener was sent out to the Academy members, it was already available on the Internet. Again, 2006 saw the greatest success for the movie industry when 16 days passed before a screener was leaked. Over the 2003 to 2008 period, the average screener leak time was 6 days.

The most telling figures are when one looks at the number of movies nominated from 2003 to 2008 – a total of 185 movies. Of these 185, a massive 182 of these leaked to the internet in some way (from ‘cams’ upwards) and a worrying number – 143 – were leaks of ‘Screener’ copies, often leaked to uploaders by industry insiders.

In the vast majority of cases, a DVD or Screener copy of the movie was available for download on Oscar night.

Last year we reported on the OscarTorrents site. The site will not be available again this year as the creators have no time, but they’re promising to be “back next year”. In the meantime (and as usual), the full range of movies will be available at dozens of other torrent sites, right around the world.

The full Waxy spreadsheet is available to view via Google, in Excel format (with formulas) and CSV

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.