Petteri Pyyny
30 May 2002 15:22
According to Viant, a research company which specializes in Internet piracy, Net users download an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 pirate movie copies a day at the moment -- up by at least 20 per cent from last year's figures.
Company also points out that major releases, such as this summer's megahits Star Wars Episode II and Spiderman, will take the numbers even higher. Viant estimated that at one point, shortly after it was widely reported that both movies are available as an illegal copies in the Net, at least 10M users tried to download at least one of these movies. Funniest thing is that only two or three million users actually succeeded in their task :-)
It would be nice to know, what percentage of these users who downloaded, for example SWEp2, actually went to a movie theatre to see the movie and how many of them will purchase the DVD once it hits the stores. I bet that the number would be extremely high.