IPretorian Blog, Internet Privacy Protector

Record labels keep complain how piracy is killig film business: once move end up on BitTorrent, it’s doomed. Well, here is example to contrary: “Ink“. Created by Jamin and Kiowa Winans with small budget, yet great ideas – story about a mercenary who appears in the dreams of a comatose 8 year old girl. None of Hollywood studios was interested, so they decided to self distribute it to independent cinemas through own firm Double Edge Films. Despite Denver film festival “Best International Feature” award and few others DVD and Blu-ray sales where low.

Until November 2009 when “Ink” got ripped and shared on few torrent sites: within about a week film was pushed by incredible 400 000 downloads to TOP10 popular movies by TorrentFreak – success impossible to achieve in traditional model, happened online. If we believe MPAA, that should finish off Jamina and Kiowa Winans – they should be broke by now. But something very different has happened: sky-high downloads and enthusiastic reviews pushed the movie to 16th place on IMDb’s movie meter – resulting big increase on DVD and Blu-ray sales. Unlike majority of Hollywood studio’s bossess creators of “Ink” decided to embrace new found pirate fans: Kiowa wrote to TorrentFreak, saying: “We made this film in Denver, CO on a budget of $250,000 and have fought to bring it to 15 cities ourselves over the past ten months. Hollywood has claimed that they don’t know how to market the film or that it doesn’t have an audience, and what BitTorrent has done in the last four days is prove, unequivocally, that Hollywood is wrong.”

German magazine Gulli.com intervieved “Ink” creators “shocked by all this news” and happy with new found way to reach viewers. Koiwa explained, that they gained revenue not only from DVD and Blu-ray sales, but generous donations from all over the world – since they added paypal support link “If You have watched Ink for free online and would like to contribute what You can click here“. ”Ink” is available on Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes – and BitTorrent off course. If You have watched it for free, we encourage You to support Ink creators.

Message from this case is clear: movie makers, don’t be hostages to big distribution industry! Publish film online, see what happens..