Donate
  • Freedom
  • Innovation
  • Growth

Leaked Slides Show Sony's Worry About Piracy in the Movie Business

St. Louis Business Journal

By Brian Feldt

More than a quarter of St. Louisans say super-fast Internet such as Google Fiber makes it more likely they'll download movies or TV shows illegally.

That's according to a leaked survey obtained by TorrentFreak. The survey was conducted on behalf of Warner Brothersand Sony Pictures Entertainment and asked people in St. Louis and Kansas City if high-speed Internet like Google Fiber would increase their pirating activities.

The leaked slides are from 2012, but they offer a glimpse into what big-time movie studios are thinking when it comes to their competition.

According to a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Lewisville, Texas-based think tank that found film piracy was costing the U.S. economy $20.5 billion annually.

In 2014, pirates were most interested in the moral ambiguities at play in "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Game of Thrones," which was the most-pirated television showfor the third year in a row.

Martin Scorsese's biopic on white-collar criminal Jordan Belfort (Leonard DiCaprio) was illegally downloaded 30.0 million times — more than any other movie this year according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio, reported Variety. Meanwhile, in its analysis of BitTorrent downloads, TorrentFreak determined that "Game of Thrones" was pirated 8.1 million times this year — more than the HBO show's series-high viewership of 7.2 million.