I’ve been reading all around the Internet about some kind of a survey that was done by someone or some company, taking a simple poll of only 2600 people, and coming up with a figure of 25 million people who Pirate movies from Internet sources. And having just watched Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Mans Chest from Netflix, [which by the way, is worth seeing], it made me wonder just how accurate these numbers could really be.

You see after reading these articles, which all use one single company as the source, I tried to locate the companies site and a press release, any article, or anything that described the methodology they used to determine the accuracy of their findings. Why? Because I think the number of Pirates among us is much higher.

Their survey only counted the number of Pirates who downloaded illegal movies, not the Rent and Burn crowd. These are the Pirates who rent movies from Blockbuster, Netflix and so forth and burn a copy to DVD, then return the movie. Or the Pirates who buy the movie then make copies for family and friends.

One only has to take a quick journey around the Internet to find a multitude of Rip and Burn software available. And there are products also available to remove all protections that may be encrypted on the DVD as well. And I only know of a few sites like 123 Studios that have actually been closed down, only to have the software resurrected by another company outside the confines of the FBI.

I don’t have any accurate numbers as to many how many Pirates are among us, but Jack Sparrow might even be surprised !

Comments as always are welcome.

Tags: pirates, movies, dvd, burn