Posted by:
on Jun 2, 2010
| Tagged in: piracy
Dunlap Grubb & Weaver was engaged by the US Copyright Group to go to battle once again against illegal Internet movie piracy. “The Hurt Locker”, a 2009 Oscar-winning war film set in Iraq and produced by Nicolas Chartier at Voltage Pictures, is at the center of this latest lawsuit.
The film had its widespread United States release in July 2009. Despite winning six of the nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated, the film grossed just $16 million. Nevertheless, there have been tens of thousands of illegal downloads of this film by Internet users, which conduct constitutes clear copyright infringement. This film was also the victim of widespread pirating within the United States five months before the film was released here. The copyright owner, Voltage Pictures, believes this is central to the movie’s lackluster performance within the U.S.
TorrentFreak.com, a site focusing almost exclusively on news about BitTorrent, reported on February 8th, 2010 that “The Hurt Locker” was the fourth most pirated movie during the previous week. This is one statistic that has the rightful owners of “The Hurt Locker” reeling. While the exact number of those illegally downloading the movie is not certain, the number could reach 50,000-75,000 across all different platforms of file sharing.
