X Men Origins leaks and spreads like wild fire

Though most of this article focuses on the piracy aspect of this incident there is a section that discusses the incredible speed of "infection" the internet has brought to the world as a social network. A production cut of the new X Men movie, due to release May 1st, made its way onto thepiratebay.org on April 1st and rapidly spread throughout the downloading community. It says "The bootleg spread like wildfire, and by some accounts there were over one hundred thousand downloads on the first day alone." Since this was only in the relatively small community of people who are heavily involved in the online piracy world that would have known about this release on such short notice we can see first hand how small the diameter of the P2P sharing graph is.

*EDIT* sorry forgot the link http://digg.com/d1oYjh

Going along the lines of this x-men link, I really like how dvd screening shown to critics get published online for people to pirate. I know of people who had dvd quality movies such as slumdog millionaire or gran torino two weeks before the movies came out in the theater. No longer do people need to download the very crappy "cam" version of movies in theaters. Previously people used to be satisfied with someone recording a movie through a camcorder, even if peoples heads on seen on film. Now, we have access to dvd screenings that are shown to critics and don't even have to wait for the movie to come out in order to watch it. It is just as amazing how fasts these video files are made available. I guess that dvd screenings don't have tight security ensuring that no one steals copies of them, as they figure people would still want to watch a movie in the theaters.

What impresses me even more is how this x-men movie was leaked before it is in its final production stage. I've seen clips of the movie and its pretty funny how there are still strings attached to people during stunts. I guess if someone doesn't want to pay 10 dollars and wants to see a movie really bad before it comes out, they don't mind seeing an unfinished product.

This article is a couple years old, but the first hit for watermarked screeners on Google is http://www.slate.com/id/2134292/. I'm not sure the current status of this, how common it is, and how often it is subverted, but this article describes a leaked watermarked screener being traced back to the source.

By no means the only site on the web like this, Googling watermark wolverine, has http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.104528 as the first hit, where thoughts like

It might be interesting to watch a movie without the special effects. But I'd want to see it after I saw it with the specials.

and

Well i don't think its considered pirating because its not the final version.

can be found. Varying points of views on whether or not this leak has watermarks or not are also discussed there.