Let the Pirating Begin: The Social Network Hits the Torrent Circuit

For most popular movies, a pirated copy hits the Internet shortly after the movie hits the big screen, if not sooner. For a movie like “The Social Network” – the semi-fictional story of Facebook’s somewhat murky origins – it seems that the lid has been kept shut tight…until now.

BitTorrent-focused blog TorrentFreak tells us that the big-screen hit has finally hit the Internet and it’s set to be one of the most pirated movies of the year.

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According to TorrentFreak, “The Social Network” was the most searched for movie in October on KickassTorrents, a BitTorrent tracker site. But until just last week, nothing was available. Now, a “DVD Screener” – a review copy of a movie that contains watermarking and scrolling marquee warnings about unauthorized viewing – has hit the Internet and it’s seen more than 100,000 downloads in the last 24 hours.

According to the folks at TorrentFreak, though, we haven’t seen anything yet.

This is just the beginning though. Usually, the greatest download boost for a pirated movie occurs with the release of a DVDrip copy, and that has yet to come for The Social Network. If this happens in the next month, the film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and friends might have a shot at ending up in the list of top 10 most pirated films of this year.

A dubious honor, but not necessarily a financial disaster.

So far, it looks like the pirated copy has been most popular in the U.S., with the U.K., Canada, Australia and India following.

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