May 13, 2010 11:16 am

If you downloaded ‘Hurt Locker’ illegally, you are probably getting sued

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Producers form the film the Hurt Locker are taking the war against online piracy to the next level by filing a massive lawsuit against over 10,000 users on the popular BitTorrent website. Good luck finding all the ISPs…

Hollywood is fighting back on the people who illegally download their films and share them on P2P sites. In the coming months Voltage Pictures intends to sue over 10,000 users on popular file sharing sites that pirated their Oscar winning film The Hurt Locker.

According to Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm, the multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuit should be filed this week. He declines to say exactly how many individuals will be targeted, but expect the number to be in the tens of thousands, if not more. “Locker” first leaked onto the web more than five months before its U.S. release…

OK, wait. Does anyone else see a problem here? The film showed up 5 months before it hit the theaters. Well that seems more along the lines of a production company problem now, doesn’t it? Sure BitTorrent users are breaking the law by illegally sharing films and television shows online, but usually the problems don’t surface until after the film is released into theaters, allowing people with shaky cameras to produce pirated DVDs or poor quality videos that they can then share online.

This is obviously the fault of Voltage Pictures. Nobody broke into their offices so they could steal their low-budget picture with the intention of releasing it online months before it’s release date. Voltage sent a DVD of the film out to different companies in order to garner distribution. Assuming that no one would leak the film was awfully naive on their part. It would seem to me that the only person that deserves to be sued is the person that initially downloaded the film on BitTorrent. I know others illegally downloaded the movie and this is a way for Hollywood producers to combat movie piracy, but if the people at Voltage Pictures don’t send that DVD out to distributors, it never leaks online and they don’t get a 5 month head start on Oscar season (which they won).

‘Hurt Locker’ Producers About To Sue An Army Of Pirates [The Hollywood Reporter]