PIRATED COPIES OF GRAVITY GO ONLINE

Pirated copies of Gravity have begun turning up online — all of them camcorded in theaters on opening weekend. But not only aren’t they in 3D, the quality is nothing short of atrocious. And, another thing, they’re not in English. As TorrentFreak.com, which tracks BitTorrent usage pointed out, because of the crackdown on theater pirates in the U.S., many camcorded movies are turning up online with Russian and Spanish audio (later replaced by English audio when someone records the audio in a U.S. theater, something that can easily be accomplished without risking arrest). Some die-hard American pirates, however, are not easily discouraged. TorrentFreak reported that two Detroit men were arrested last weekend by MPAA investigators after they returned to the same theater week after week and camcorded movies with invisible watermarks revealing the theater’s location. But TorrentFreak raises a pertinent question: why would anyone want to watch an inferior copy of a film like Gravity? Such a movie, it observed, “really deserves to be seen as the makers intended, not on some terrible cam copy that takes us back 50 years.”