In digital age, can movie piracy be stopped?
The highly anticipated movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" debuts today in theaters, but many fans have already seen it. The online leak of a pirated, unfinished version of the 20th Century Fox film a month ago sent federal authorities springing into action and stoked a heated conversation within the entertainment industry about digital piracy.
Piracy of upcoming films is not new, but the theft of "Wolverine" is especially troubling for an industry concerned with a stalled economy and the financial bottom line.
It's rare for high-quality copies of a big-budget blockbuster to appear on the Internet more than a month before the film's release, experts say. Within a week of "Wolverine's" March 31 leak, more than a million people had downloaded the movie, according to TorrentFreak, a blog devoted to the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.
