Piracy, that's why I sinned!

A new website called PiracyData.org presents the movies that have been illegally downloaded the most times each week. Along with these results, it also shows whether the movies are available through streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, or even for digital rental or purchase from services like Amazon Prime or YouTube. We present the results:

As you can see, none of the top movies that have been illegally this week are available for streaming, and only three of the 10 are available for digital rental. The website PiracyData.org gets information about their availability from Can I Stream It? and the numbers concerning piracy from TorrentFreak. According to PiracyData.org, none of the most downloaded movies by pirates over the past three weeks were available via streaming.

The same view is supported by Ted Sorandos, CEO of Netflix, who in an interview with the magazine Stuff last May said: «we have observed that BitTorrent traffic is decreasing as Netflix traffic grows». He also said, according to the Washington Post, that «the best way to combat piracy is not legislation or criminal prosecution, but good choices.»

Of course opinions differ. There is not always a correlation between availability and piracy, said a representative of the American Film Association, the «The Walking Dead» was downloaded more than 500,000 times within 16 hours, despite the fact that it is available for free via streaming for 27 days from AMC».

However, from what it seems not everyone shares the same view. The «Game of Thrones » was the series that pirates loved in 2012, and as the HBO director (the production company), David Petrarca, noted, piracy does not «bother him as “as long as it is advertising».

The article was published in the Huffington Post