DivX has evolved video technology, but also evolved piracy, besides trading MP3 files also movies are now transferred over the internet, giving the movie industry a headache.
A recent report by research company Viant reveals that between 400,000 and 600,000 film copies are illegally downloaded daily on the Internet, up at least 20 percent from last year.
A year ago, Viant had estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 movies were being illegally transferred daily over Internet channels such as Usenet, IRC, Gnutella and FastTrack. |
The surge in activity this year reflected the unprecedented frenzy of illicit online trading centered on two of the summer's most anticipated releases, "Spider-Man" and "Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones," it said.
After "Star Wars" and "Spider-Man" marked their black-market Web debut in May, the number of file-swappers online at one time soared to over 9 million, Viant said. During peak hours, about 2.5 million people were logged on to the file-swapping Internet Relay Chat--about five times the norm, it said.
Viant estimated that of the nearly 10 million people who appear to have sought bootleg copies of "Star Wars" and "Spider-Man" on the Internet, only about 2 million to 3 million were successful in obtaining complete copies of either.
People will need a fast connection to download the files that are mainly around 600-700 MB (So they fit on a CD) and good sources to download a movie.
If this information is correct almost 300.000 GB of movies are being traded on the internet every day !
Source: News.com
