20th Century Fox has been very much on top of internet piracy and has tried to get as many people as possible prosectued for illegaly downloading their movies or other content. I myself have gotten TWO cease and desist orders from then through my cable company. (Used to be a big Pirate. ARGGHH!) So it isn’t even necessary to say that when their latest blockbuster movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was leaked on March 31st they went ballistic. The copy of the film that was leaked was still in post production and many special effects were yet to be implemented. The overall look of the copy was still by and large excellent. The FBI was involved from the beginning but to this day no arrests have been made in the case.

This is not the first time that even I can recall a movie of DVD quality being released before it is actually released in theaters yet. I recall the same thing happening with Jason X and The Hulk movies of several years back. I remember a day when movies that were leaked onto torrents were for the most part horrible. Especially if the movie was still in theaters. They were horrible sounding, scratchy, twitchy versions of themselves. Alot of them had bad cropping, people talking or walking in front of the camera, and other very annoying things. The technology that these pirates and hackers use has increased massively in recent years. It is not uncommon to see a movie available for download in DVD quality that is still in your local cinema. A lot of these releases are leaked copies of DVDs that are sent to critics and the like for review. These copies contain watermarks but creative pirates can completely remove any trace of these.

The problem with controlling or stopping piracy all together is two fold. There is the fact that the internet resides in this massive legal gray area right now. There are so many websites up from so many countries all over the world. Some of these sites and their servers are located in countries that do not have international copyright laws. The second flaw with catching these people is that after a file has been uploaded to a few people it will spread like wildfire with all the people downloading it also uploading it to others at the same time.  With there being so many people involved in the crimes it is very hard if not impossible to do anything about it.

It is estimated that within a week of “Wolverine” being uploaded it had been downloaded by over a million people. That number rose up and up obviously as time has gone on. If they are ever really going to do anything about piracy on the internet it would probably take some sort of rewriting of the entire net as a whole. Other wise they’ll just keep comin up with ways to block pirates, and the pirates will keep coming up with more inventive ways of getting around it all.