Pirating movies has been a growing problem in recent years, costing studios millions of dollars in lost ticket sales. In the past year, the Motion Picture Association of America says that nearly $1 billion worth of pirated movies and TV shows were downloaded.
It goes without saying that online streaming has been a growing trend as well. Netflix has led the charge, with Hulu, HBO and others also capitalizing on the trend. While these are the legitimate channels, online pirates subvert them to dodge subscription fees.
“Game of Thrones” is a wildly popular HBO series that was the target of hackers and pirates earlier this year and much of season was leaked online, whether it was plot points or actual episodes. Hackers even tried to press HBO to pay a ransom for the material but ultimately released it anyway.
One of the more popular mediums for downloading and watching content is BitTorrent, which operates as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. It is capable of distributing a massive amount of data over the internet.
Although it is widely known that many files are shared and downloaded illegally over this service, it still manages to operate. Authorities use the site as well to track some users who don’t hide their IP addresses via a proxy and nab them for illegally distributing or downloading content.
24/7 Wall St. has taken a look at some of the more popular movies that were pirated this past week. These are the top 10 most pirated movies of the past week on BitTorrent:
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle
- Dunkirk
- The Mountain Between Us
- The Foreigner
- Flatliners
- American Made
- Mother!
- Coco
- What Happened to Monday
- Thor: Ragnarok
Take This Retirement Quiz To Get Matched With An Advisor Now (Sponsored)
Are you ready for retirement? Planning for retirement can be overwhelming, that’s why it could be a good idea to speak to a fiduciary financial advisor about your goals today.
Start by taking this retirement quiz right here from SmartAsset that will match you with up to 3 financial advisors that serve your area and beyond in 5 minutes. Smart Asset is now matching over 50,000 people a month.
Click here now to get started.
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.