While the makers of both films couldn’t be happier, there’s also a dark side to this success.

Soon after the Hollywood festivities ended, the number of downloads for both films gradually increased.

For example, the number of 12 Years a Slave pirates downloading the film via BitTorrent tripled, resulting in more than 100,000 extra downloads on Monday.

The interest in 7-time Oscar winner Gravity increased as well, as the number of active downloaders on the most popular torrent more than doubled.

The temporary boost in piracy is a recurring phenomenon for Oscar winners. The same happened to The Hurt Locker, which prompted movie studio Voltage Pictures to sue tens of thousands of downloaders.

Whether the makers of Gravity and 12 Years a Slave have similar plans has yet to be seen.

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

The pirated screeners are a thorn in the side of Hollywood, and over the years the movie studios have implemented strict security procedures to prevent leaks. These efforts have been moderately successful, but the problem remains.

Yesterday a pirated screener copy of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty leaked onto the internet via various BitTorrent sites. While this isn’t something out of the ordinary, the fact that the screener displays a watermark with a Hollywood star’s name on it is quite unique.

The pirated copy in question is linked to Ellen DeGeneres, which is all the more painful, since she is the host for the upcoming 2014 Oscars.

As can be seen below, the leaked screener clearly lists DeGeneres’ name, suggesting that the DVD was sent to her in November. The watermark is displayed right after the opening credits, around the one minute mark.

While it’s technically possible that someone edited the screener to implicate DeGeneres, this seems unlikely. All copies of the screener that are circulating on the Internet include the same watermark, suggesting that they came from the same source.

Thus far, there has been plenty of interest in the pirated screener. Data gathered by TorrentFreak suggests that within 24 hours of its release, an estimated 250,000 copies have been already been downloaded , all with DeGeneres’ name on it.

Neither Ellen DeGeneres nor Fox have commented on the leak thus far, and it also remains unclear what the screener was intended for.

Andy Baio suggests that it could be connected to Ben Stiller’s appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show early December, for which she may have received an advance copy of the film.

This is not the first time that a celebrity has been linked to a leaked DVD screener. In 2011 a pirated copy of the Steven Spielberg movie ‘Super 8′ surfaced online with Howard Stern’s name all over it. This leak made plenty of headlines, but as far as we know Stern nor his colleagues were never investigated.

For Ellen DeGeneres the leak may perhaps serve as inspiration for a piracy joke or two at the Oscars ceremony later this year. That is, if she’s not in jail by then.

Update: Twentieth Century Fox confirmed that the copy was sent to the Ellen DeGeneres show.

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

Some of those voters will have made their assessments from a trip to the theater but some highly privileged individuals will have received a piece of cinematic gold from the studios – access to pre-release copies of all the top movies “for their consideration.”

The industry has worked very hard indeed to keep movies from leaking onto the Internet so these early copies are handed out amid tight security. The availability of a dreadful ‘camcordered’ copy online is annoying enough but a perfect digital copy is a nightmare for the studios. To this end, while physical DVD copies still appear to be issued, these days so-called “screeners” are also distributed to Academy members digitally.

However, it appears to very make little difference what kind of security measures are put in place, movies still leak online. As 2012 entered its final months the tell-tale signs that screeners were being sent out became obvious online after they became available on BitTorrent tagged “DVDSCR”.

Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car appeared online in October 2012 followed by thrillers ‘Citadel‘ and ‘The Sweeney‘ in November.

With Christmas round the corner, December certainly delivered the treats. The Perks of Being a Wallflower starring Emma Watson, Denzel Washington’s Flight, Lincoln from veteran Steven Spielberg, and James Bond’s latest outing Skyfall all found their way onto the web from screener copies.

And in January the bonanza continued. The first new leak of the year, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, has proven a massive hit with file-sharers. According to statistics gathered by TorrentFreak the fantasy movie has been downloaded at least 2 million times since it appeared on the first of the month.

Just three days later and the Osama Bin Laden hunt movie Zero Dark Thirty was debuting online, joined on the same day by a copy of Anthony Hopkins’ Hitchcock.

This weekend was particularly busy as The Sessions made its appearance along with West of Memphis, Celeste & Jesse Forever, Anna Karenina and Hyde Park on Hudson.

But there was also a very big leak, one that millions of people have been waiting for and could turn out to be the biggest so far this Oscar season. Django Unchained, the latest movie from much-loved writer/director Quentin Tarantino, appeared online Saturday and quickly caught fire.

The western, which stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, became an immediate smash-hit on BitTorrent. Statistics gathered Sunday by TorrentFreak show that the movie was downloaded at least 500,000 times in its first 24 hours online.

And, as an interesting footnote, people wanting to blame these stats on The Pirate Bay will be disappointed. Although it is back online now, the world’s most famous torrent site was offline all day yesterday and played no part in proceedings.

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

The statistics for all 2011 nominees, excluding the documentary and foreign films categories, show that 20 of the 29 films are now available on BitTorrent in DVD quality. More than half of the films have leaked as a screener and 7 of those are estimated to be leaked by Academy members.

Despite the widespread availability of these high-profile movie titles, the overall trend is that fewer high quality copies leak every year. In common with last year, the number of screener copies that surfaced online has been reduced – 38% of the all the nominated films, down from the record low of 41% this time last year.

If retail DVDs are thrown into the mix we find that 66% of the films are now available in high quality format, down from 79% around the same time last year. Interesting statistics, which are obviously welcomed by the MPAA and other Hollywood players.

Another statistic that stands out is the average time between the theatrical release in the US and the leak of the film online. This average wait time (including CAM releases) has gone up to 37 days this year, the longest wait since Baio started tracking these statistics in 2003.

It has to be noted though, that the 37 days average is a skewed picture and most leaks come out much quicker. The median leak time is only 17 days, but the average waiting time is pushed up by three movie titles for which the pirating audience had to wait for more than 100 days.

Finally, we want to draw attention to some statistics which showing that availability and box office success don’t always lead to high piracy rates.

Toy Story 3, the most successful film at the box office last year, was available in a high quality copy on BitTorrent just a day after its premiere. All the ingredients for an unprecedented number of illegal downloads were there, but somehow it didn’t even make it into the list of 2010′s most downloaded movies.

Also, this year, Rabbit Hole was only one film for which the first screener leak came out before the theatrical release last December. Despite this unfortunate timing, the film has been downloaded by only a few thousand people in the past several weeks, trailing dozens of other films in terms of popularity.

Despite the lack of a high correlation between early availability, box office revenues and piracy, the movie industry continues to worry about piracy and the losses it may generate. Given that overall movie piracy is still on the rise, we expect that both measures against torrent sites and screener leaks will be intensified throughout 2011.

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

In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the 10 nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. NewTeeVee asked us to rank the nominees by number of downloads and the results are finally in.

If every download on BitTorrent counted as a vote, District 9 would be crowned the winner, closely followed by Avatar. The least popular films according to the BitTorrent public are The Blind Side with 1,845,000 downloads and An Education with ‘only’ 683,000 downloads.

We have to note that comparing the downloads of each of the nominees is not really fair since some films have been available online for more than a year already, while others only leaked a few weeks ago. Avatar, which is second in the list with 11,326,000 downloads, became available in DVD-quality a month ago, while District 9 was already widely available last September.

As usual, all the nominated films are available online in various formats. For District 9 2,948 unique torrent files were counted, but the majority of these are inactive or have very few downloaders. Avatar beats District 9 in terms of availability with 4,280 torrent files.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions, are counted. Afterwards, the data was carefully checked and possible inaccuracies were systematically corrected.

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

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, yesterday a federal grand jury indicted Derek Hawthorne of Moorpark and Owen Moody of San Marcos on federal copyright violation charges.

Hawthorne is charged with uploading ‘Australia’ to a torrent site known as Movie Hogs and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ to Demonoid.com. Moody is charged with uploading the hit movie “Slumdog Millionaire” to The Pirate Bay.

The pair have been contacted by the FBI who ordered them to surrender to authorities next week. The charges are ‘Uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution’ which is a term under the tough Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, previously used to jail Star Wars uploaders at the now-defunct EliteTorrents site.

They face a possible punishment of three years in jail and fines of $250,000.

Authorities also arrested a third man last week. Jack Yates of Porter Ranch, an employee at a Los Angeles duplication company, is accused of illegally copying the movie ‘The Love Guru’. Yates was asked to copy the movie by Paramount so that Jay Leno could show a clip on his show but allegedly he also made a copy for himself which he passed to friends, one of which uploaded the movie to the Internet.

It’s alleged that Yates lied to the FBI so he faces stiffer punishment than the previously mentioned pair. The offense of copying the movie carries a sentence of up to a year in jail but for lying to the authorities he could get five years. He is scheduled to be arraigned March 16 2009.

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

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.

Mininova’s search cloud is a nice illustration. Below is a screenshot of the search cloud on Mininova 12 hours after the Oscar winners were announced, and for comparison, here is another one taken two days ago.

Most prominent in the search cloud is yesterday’s winner “No Country for Old Men”, that received four Oscars, including the one for the best movie.

There is more though. Almost all awarded movies are in the list of most popular searches – There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose, Juno, The Counterfeiters, Once, Sweeney Todd, Taxi to the Dark Side, Elizabeth, Ratatouille and Golden Compass. There is only one remarkable absentee from the list, and that is The Bourne Ultimatum.

People are not only trying to find the movies on BitTorrent, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the award ceremony as well, because search terms like Academy Awards and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Last year we reported on the OscarTorrents site, a site where BitTorrent users could choose their own winners. Unfortunately, the site was not available 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.

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.

For members of ‘The Scene’ – a shadowy collective of internet pirates inhabiting networks dedicated to releasing movies, music and software onto the internet (often before they are officially available), Nunez’s sister and people like her are a very valuable resource. Often unwitting, people like her are a common source of the coveted DVD screener – a promotional DVD copy of a motion picture sent by movie studios to reviewers, critics and censors before the official movie release date.

After Nunez’s sister received her copies of the movies ‘Flushed Away’ and ‘Happy Feet’ for review, it’s alleged by prosecutors that the 27 year old saw his opportunity and obtained at least one of the movies from his sister with the intention of releasing it onto the internet.

In January, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences received a tip off that ‘Flushed Away’ had been uploaded to the internet. According to VCDQuality – a site providing news relating to the availability and quality of pirated movies on the internet – the first copy appeared on 22nd December 2006 with a second report 2 days later.

Unfortunately for Nunez, the movie contained a digital watermark and although watermarks are usually removed by the Scene release group to protect its source (via a process called ‘de-dotting’), in this case this clearly did not happen. It’s a possibility that Nunez was unaware of the presence of a watermark and decided to ‘go it alone’ by releasing the movie without the support and experience of an established Scene release group. This approach has been taken before with DVD screeners, with disastrous consequences. Whatever the reason, the watermark not only identified the copy as an Academy screener but also allowed it to be traced back to his sister.

Confronted by FBI agents, Nunez confessed not only to the uploading of ‘Flushed Away’ but also to the uploading of the Oscar-nominated ‘Happy Feet’. However, a subsequent FBI forensic examination of his computer revealed only evidence relating to ‘Flushed Away’.

As the prosecution’s case is believed to fall within the realms of The Family Entertainment Act (an act partly crafted to sentence distributors of pre-release copies of films, songs or other works) Nunez finds himself charged with criminal copyright infringement.

If found guilty at his March 2007 trial, he faces up to three years in jail.

Previous convictions under the Family Entertainment Act include those of Scott McCausland and Grant T. Stanley. Both were sentenced to five months in prison followed by five months of home detention for their role in the operation of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker and specifically the internet distribution of a workprint copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, 6 hours prior to its theatrical release.

It’s doubtful that the almost inevitable conviction of Mr Nunez will deter others from DVD screener piracy. Feeling the pressure from a perceived increase in DVD Screener piracy, in 2003 the MPAA banned Oscar screeners but eventually they were re-instated. Since then, the industry has touted technical solutions such as Cinea to protect their content but for various reasons it hasn’t stopped the worldwide proliferation of this years’ candidates.

Even with the threat of jail sentences hanging in the air for original uploaders of pre-release material, virtually every Oscar nominated movie can be downloaded completely free of charge via sites such as the cheekily named www.oscartorrents.com.

This is one battle the movie studios cannot seem to win.

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