Pictured: Typical Megaupload user

This one oughta get the torrent and illegal streaming crowd all fired up. The Munich School of Management and the Copenhagen Business School recently published a paper titled “Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload” that argues the shutdown of the streaming website Megaupload actually may have hurt some films’ box office revenues. I’ll give all of the diehard pirates out there a second to do some dancing and finger-wagging before I throw a little water on this.

Noting a slight but steady change in finances across the world before and after the Megaupload shutdown — taking into account inflation, Internet penetration and the site’s popularity as well — the researchers concluded that “the shutdown had a negative, yet in some cases insignificant effect, on [smaller films'] box office revenues.” Their case then goes on to explore file sharing’s role as “a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay.”

Okaaaaaay, buuuuuuuut…

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If you’ve seen five minutes of any of their movies (Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Epic Movie), you know that without a doubt, Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg are two of the finest satirists ever to live.  The way they skewer societal paradigms with Paris Hilton impersonators getting hit by cars and Lady Gaga slipping on a banana peel… (*kisses fingertips*) magnifique.  Acclaimed film critic Armond White once said of the duo, “they stand so lonely on pop-culture’s fringe that their a la carte recidivism seems absolutely contre-jour when compared to the ersatz Hollywood j ne sais quois.”

Well sadly, it seems those two national treasures may not receive the compensation they so richly deserve for their upcoming masterpiece “Vampires Suck.”  According to a new report, it has been downloaded illegally 100,000 times.

An unfinished copy of “Vampires Suck,” Fox’s the hotly anticipated [!!!] parody of “Twilight”, has now been downloaded more than 100,000 times since its leak more than a month ago, according to TorrentFreak.
Now faced with another major leak, Fox’s legal department has quietly become more aggressive, sending takedown requests to torrent sites and Google. They likely want to avoid the fate of the 2004 parody film “Soul Plane,” [!!!] which prompted an FBI investigation after pirated copies flooded the black market weeks before its release.
“Soul Plane” was cited as one of the first Hollywood films to be impacted by digital piracy [the horror!]. Will pirates suck the life out of “Vampires Suck?” [LORD GOD I HOPE NOT!] Fox is publicly downplaying down the leak [DERP!], saying the incident occurred a month ago and there isn’t anything new to report. [Yahoo/THR]

That’s depressing.  Not the piracy, the fact that 100,000 people actually wanted to see Vampires Suck.  Illegally downloading a Seltzer-Freebird movie is like stealing a Susan Boyle sex tape.

It’s been two or three days since Wolverine was leaked online (either a “DVD-quality workprint” or an “incomplete, early version with missing and unedited scenes” depending on who you ask), but naturally the internet’s still a-buzz about it, and Fox is talking tough.

“Fox vowed Wednesday that the source of the “stolen, incomplete and early version” of the movie would be prosecuted and said the FBI and MPAA are investigating the leak.” [AP]

“Fox executives are describing it to me as one of the worst piracy scandals they can recall, since it involves a major studio and major movie [Editor's dismissive wank]. The studio is understandably in a panic. With the film opening on May 1st, this leak could cause incalculable damage to the box office of the latest in the valuable X-Men franchise. The studio must find out who did this and punish him/her/them to the full extent of the law.” [DHD]

First of all, the box office impact of this will be miniscule – pirated DVDs have always been available in New York, and I’ve never once bought one instead of seeing it in the theater.  Likewise, if I actually plan on seeing a movie, I’m not going to watch it on my laptop.  Secondly, the FBI?  You mean the guys that infiltrate terrorist cells and investigate serial killers (or is there some sort of Film Bureau of Investigations that I don’t know about)?  We’ve got them investigating how a Hugh Jackman movie got posted on the internet now?  Look, if Rupert Murdoch has enough money to pay Chris Klein for this performance, he can certainly afford his own DVD piracy death squad.  So I’d appreciate it if you kept my tax dollars far far away from an investigation about f’ing Wolverine.  All 42 of them.