Oscar Screeners Leak Online, Pirates Saved a Trip to the Movie Theater

If by some crazy chance you’d like to watch excellent brand-new movies for free in the privacy of your own home while other chumps trek all the way to the theater to pay for them, you’re in luck! DVD screeners intended for Oscar voters are popping up all over file-sharing networks; in the past week or so, high-quality versions of 3:10 to Yuma, Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Bucket List, Charlie Wilson’s War, Gone Baby Gone, The Great Debaters, I’m Not There, No Country for Old Men, and Redacted have all surfaced on BitTorrent sites, and as long as you know where to look (*cough*), and don’t mind bending a few copyright laws, they can be downloaded fairly easily.

Screeners typically bear a traceable digital watermark, so the journalist(s) and/or Academy member(s) responsible for these leaks have probably already been thrown in the clink, but since this now happens every Oscar season without fail, it sort of makes one wonder how much longer movie studios will mail these things out. Let’s hope at least until someone leaks Juno and There Will Be Blood!