Oscar nominees typically enjoy a box office bounce. But Hollywood increasingly has to reckon with another award-season ritual, one that could best be described as the piracy plunder.But why is that a problem? The only reason those films received this additional attention was because of the Oscar nods, so complaining about the similar bump in unauthorized downloading seems bizarre. Seriously, if you are getting a bunch more people paying for the movie, are you really that concerned that another group is viewing it in an unauthorized manner? It's as if some people actually believe that every unauthorized download is a lost sale.
The attention that an Oscar nomination for best picture bestows on a title also triggers a spike in illegal downloading.
It's pretty simple: if you're getting downloaded more, it means there's more interest in your film, and it's your job as a film producer to figure out how to make money from that interest. It's not something to complain about.
The article also highlights, as we've discussed at great lengths, how the producer, Nicolas Chartier of Voltage Films, of last year's Oscar winner for best picture, Hurt Locker chose to sue 5,000 fans of his film for unauthorized downloading. Of course, it leaves out the part where he also called someone a "moron" and a "thief" for explaining to him, quite politely, why such a strategy might backfire. The reporter asks Chartier about the backlash, and he suggests that nobody knows who produces what films, so he doesn't care if he gets a bad reputation: "I don't think anyone is waking up saying, 'Let's boycott movies made by Voltage.'" Apparently Chartier doesn't use the internet much. There are, in fact, efforts by people to get everyone to boycott Voltage films because of his actions.
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