Star Trek’ Tops List of Year’s Most Pirated Movies

Though “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” may have represented the year’s most notorious case of film piracy film, hitting the Internet a month before it was released in theaters, it was not the year’s most widely pirated film, The Hollywood Reporter said. That dubious distinction belonged to the J. J. Abrams-directed reboot of “Star Trek,” which topped a list of disparate films compiled by the Web site TorrentFreak.com, which tracks the file-sharing program BitTorrent.

According to that list, “Star Trek” was downloaded 10.96 million times, and guy-oriented blockbusters dominated the chart: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was No. 2 with 10.6 million downloads; “The Hangover” was No. 4 with 9.18 million downloads; and “Wolverine” was No. 9 with 7.2 million downloads. But there was no accounting for pirates’ tastes, and no clear correlation between instances of piracy and the overall box office grosses of these movies: No. 3 on the list was the Guy Ritchie misfire “RocknRolla,”which earned less than $26 million worldwide but was downloaded more than 9.4 million times; the No. 5 slot went to the first installment of “Twilight,”which grossed nearly $385 million globally and was downloaded more than 8.7 million times.

The complete list of the 10 most pirated films:

1. “Star Trek” (10.96 million downloads)
2. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (10.6 million)
3. “RocknRolla” (9.43 million)
4. “The Hangover” (9.18 million)
5. “Twilight” (8.72 million)
6. “District 9″ (8.28 million)
7. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (7.93 million)
8. “State of Play” (7.44 million)
9. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (7.2 million)
10. “Knowing” (6.93 million)

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/star-trek-tops-list-of-years-most-pirated-movies/