Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy

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Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy
November 10, 2009

" Hollywood often complains about the billions of dollars allegedly lost due to piracy. Indie film makers, on the other hand, tend to welcome the free buzz generated when their film is pirated. The makers of Ink belong to this latter group, and are thanking the hundreds and thousands of people who downloaded their movie on BitTorrent.

Written and directed by Jamin Winans, Ink is the story of a brutal mercenary who appears in the dreamscape of a comatose 8 year old called Emma. Like virtually every movie nowadays, the film ended up being ripped and put on BitTorrent just a few days ago.

In this short time span it was downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent alone, earning it a spot in TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies this week.

For most Hollywood bosses this is usually a trigger to start complaining about lost revenue, but the makers of Ink are welcoming their new pirate audience.

In an email to the followers of their newsletter, Jamin and Kiowa Winans say that they have “embraced the piracy” and are “just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.” Thanks to the pirated copy their movie jumped to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter, and according to the makers this increased popularity also boosted DVD and Blu-ray sales.

Who needs a hefty marketing budget to promote a movie (and merchandise) when they have BitTorrent? Sent out a few hours ago, here’s the mailing in full.

" Dear Fans and Friends,

Over the weekend something pretty extraordinary happened. Ink got ripped off. Someone bit torrented the movie (we knew this would happen) and they posted it on every pirate site out there. What we didn’t expect was that within 24 hours Ink would blow up. Ink became the number 1 most downloaded movie on several sites having been downloaded somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 times as far as we can tell. Knowing there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, we’ve embraced the piracy and are just happy Ink is getting unprecedented exposure.

As a result, Ink is now ranked #16 on IMDb’s movie meter and is currently one of the top 20 most popular movies in the world.

This all started as a result of the completely underground buzz that you’ve each helped us create. We’ve had no distributor, no real advertising and yet the word of mouth that you’ve generated has made the film blow up as soon as it became available worldwide. So many of you came to see the movie multiple times, bringing friends and family and many of you have bought the DVD and Blu-ray from us. All of this built up and built up and suddenly it exploded.

We don’t know exactly where this will all lead, but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.

Ink hits Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes and many more tomorrow! Remember to get your signed copies, t-shirts and posters at the Ink Store.

Thank you so much for the constant love and support.

Jamin and Kiowa
Double Edge Films"
"

:source: Source: http://torrentfreak.com/indie-movie-...piracy-091110/:view: Homepage: http://torrentfreak.com

Awesome! I'm off to grab it now.

I would have never heard of it, if it wasn't for pirating...so guess Ink is rightfully so, good enough of a movie to at least rent I thought, and will be renting, hate spending $20 to watch a movie once, when I can spend $3 and watch once and still support them :)

Available to stream on netflix

Yeah that too :)

Lucky ones :P

Good film and as with most movies/music/games that I download I would never have paid money to watch/listen/play as had never heard of it.

It's a question I've always pondered as to whether artists & directors would be happier to have a larger audience including pirates for their work or a smaller all legit paying audience?? Surely artistic recognition and appreciation has got to rank highly............but then money does make the world go around!!:idunno:

We should all move our servers and seedboxes in India :lol:

It's a indie movie, not india. AKA Independent Film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SonsOfLiberty

It's a indie movie, not india. AKA Independent Film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film

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C'mon SoL... you spoiled the fun ! :lol::lol::lol::lol:

Shame on me! i thought it's related to bollywood...

never heard of it before...but guess what I'll be grabbing next ^^