For at least the past two years around Oscar time I’ve bemoaned the fact that it’s so hard to get access to short films, even those nominated for Academy Awards. Last year Apple picked up some of the slack by making a few of the films available for download through iTunes, but this year there’s a more interesting offering.
Oscar Torrents provides summaries of all the nominated films and links to torrents (the files you can feed into bittorrent software, see wikipedia for an introduction) or youtube pages for the films. Not every film is available, but there are enough to give anyone a good overview of what’s up for awards.
It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the site disappear pretty quickly. It’s sure to upset the academy and the MPAA, and its creators may well be deliberately goading them. But it does once again highlight the fact that the existing distribution systems just aren’t up to the task of the most talked about films to the masses.
(via waxy, who also has an interesting analysis of piracy and the Oscars)
Tags: Oscars, MPAA, Bittorrent, file sharing, Oscar Torrents, Film Distribution