Pirates!

Here is an interesting story. A man went to watch The Simpsons Movie on opening day with a camcorder. He filmed the entire thing and released it onto the P2P networks the same day. Seventy two hours later over a hundred thousand downloads were recorded from just the popular sharing networks. It had even been translated into French.

I've seen these 'handy cam' movies, and they truly suck. Someone usually uploads a trailer to YouTube, and the 60 seconds are truly horrifying. It's so torturous I cannot imagine watching a feature length film.

I have to believe that the majority of the 'consumers' are collectors. People who's only desire is to own it before anyone else. I'd guess that the vast majority of them don't watch the movie in its entirety.

The hidden gem in this story is that they caught the guy who did the original filming. He apparently took no steps to obscure his IP which lead police right to his door.