A HACKER group has illegally stolen some of Hollywood’s biggest films to be released this summer and is promising to dump them online.
The pro-piracy group, which calls itself Hive-CM8, claims to have obtained high quality versions of films such as Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, The Revenant starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Will Smith’s NFL-based drama Concussion.
The group has already started leaking some of the films online and is promising to release at least 40 in total in the coming days.
“Will do them all one after another, 9th hot title,” reads the documentation accompanying the most recently leaked film, Spotlight, which was released yesterday, according to Motherboard.
The films are all high-quality DVD screeners, which are copies sent to people like journalists, award judges, and other industry professionals for evaluation purposes.
Some members of the public have delighted in the torrent of free entertainment, exalting the group for bolstering their holiday plans. But of course the hack has drawn criticism from frustrated industry insiders.
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The leaked version of The Hateful Eight has been traced back to a top Hollywood executive, co-CEO of Alcon Entertainment, Andrew Kosove.
The FBI, working in conjunction with major Hollywood studio The Weinstein Co., were able to pinpoint his copy of the film as the source of the leak from a watermark on the DVD sent to him. However he has denied ever receiving the film.
“I’ve never seen this DVD... It’s never touched my hands. We’re going to do more than co-operate with the FBI. We’re going to conduct our own investigation to find out what happened,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Film Trailer: 'The Hateful Eight'
Given the nature of esoteric bittorrent sites, it is practically impossible to know how many times a movie has been illegally downloaded. But “copyright intelligence” firm Excipio estimated that Tarantino’s newest flick was downloaded 1.3 million times in 24 hours after being dumped online.
The Hive-CM8 group has reportedly been operating for close to five years and in the past has been responsible for leaking films such as The Hobbit, 12 Years a Slave, The Social Network and Interstellar.
It is not uncommon for a string of high profile movies to be leaked in the lead up to awards season but the purported size and coordination of the latest hack is unprecedented.
As one reddit user noted on a thread discussing the leaks: “Screener season is officially in full swing.”
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