Star Trek Most Pirated Film of the Year

According to TorrentFreak, Star Trek was the most pirated movie of 2010 followed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The chart below, the number of downloads is first, the worldwide gross is second.

1 Star Trek 10,960,000 $385,459,120
2 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen 10,600,000 $834,969,807
3 RocknRolla 9,430,000 $25,728,089
4 The Hangover 9,180,000 $459,422,869
5 Twilight 8,720,000 $384,997,808
6 District 9 8,280,000 $204,570,836
7 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 7,930,000 $929,359,401
8 State of Play 7,440,000 $87,784,194
9 X-Men Origins: Wolverine 7,200,000 $373,062,569
10 Knowing 6,930,000 $183,260,464

Obviously the studios are not pleased, despite breaking new records in box office grosses with a $10 billion in one year for the first time ever in just the US and Canada (totals for worldwide not released). Paramount especially has been displeased citing Star Trek multiple times in a lobby attempts to the FCC to try and get internet providers to become enforcers of copyright standards. Most of these numbers do not include the DVD rips that probably have replaced camcorder copies available over the summer. It should also be noted that these numbers are worldwide, not limited to just the United States.

Part of the outrage is the studio assumes a 1:1 ratio in illegal copies. In other words, they feel that for every copy downloaded is one copy they would have sold. Which isn't true. Which they can't even prove, but then no one has really asked them too, just accepting their nonsensical billions in lost sales as gospel. I would love for someone to explain to me how sales can increase while apparently pirating is increasing yet somehow it is affecting sales negatively.

As far as I can tell, it seems pirating has become a form of sampling for many people, used to make a decision before committing to a purchase. It’s just something they assume as part of their calculations and outrage. If someone finds a crappy camcorder quality recording of a movie, especially a FX heavy movie, acceptable then they never had any intention of going to the theatre to begin with.

I am not agreeing with pirating, I am such saying that available data and sales seems to contradict the Hollywood line. Rather than spend millions and millions fighting pirates, attacking customers and more, it seems there are better ways. When Hollywood tries to find them (iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, etc), they benefit. When they essentially manufacture numbers, turn their customers into villains, attempt to get ISPs into our daily lives to monitor internet use at a granular level, then I don't see how anybody wins.