14 DAY TRIAL // More and more people agree that piracy is a service issue. Encouragingly, these people include artists and, sometimes, even people at labels, movie or game studios. The entertainment business still acts as if piracy is going to wipe out the entire creative industry, but things are moving in the right direction.
And proof that piracy is directly linked to weather people can find the movies or shows they want when they want to is very evident over at the new PiracyData.org website.
The site mashes up data from TorrentFreak, the top 10 most pirated movies on BitTorrent, along with data from Can I Stream It. The end result is a chart of the top 10 most popular movies on BitTorrent and whether they are available online in any form, streaming, rental or purchase.
Obviously, this data has been available for a while, but it's only now been put into context like this. And the results speak for themselves. For the past three weeks, the time over which the data has been collected, none of the top 10 movies, not a single one has been available for streaming, on Netflix, Hulu and so on.
Only one in five have been available for rental and a little over half of them could have been bought from the likes of iTunes and Amazon.
This week, four of the top 10 movies can't be bought, rented or streamed anywhere. Three are available for streaming and, for six, a digital copy can be purchased online.
Obviously, people will and do pirate movies and shows even if they are available legally. In fact, some will grab it from BitTorrent even if it's available somewhere for free, sometimes it's just a matter of habits. But it's pretty clear that the entertainment business could do a lot more to fight piracy in a way that satisfies consumers, rather than trying to get Google, ISPs or the courts to force people to pay it.