Should Billboard Create a ‘Most Illegally Downloaded’ Chart?

Earlier this year,Warner Bros. started releasing previously unavailable back catalog DVD’s on-demand, literally creating one for each customer since the demand for these more obscure titles was too low to make mass production economical.  Still, they had to first decide which titles in their vaults to bother digitizing.  How did they do it?  From the article:

"As a general rule, films considered for release are evaluated by how well they did in the VHS era, which saw about 4,100 movies from Warner’s library released on videocassette over a span of more than 20 years. Other factors include the availability of good-quality prints, consumer requests and interest on the black market.

‘Some films that are not available on DVD have gotten a lot of bootlegging,’ Feltenstein says. ‘We track that on the Internet.’"

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about pirated copies being a gage of consumer interest, but it’s one of the first times I’ve seen a legitimate corporation actually using it as a metric in making an expensive decision.  I’m sure it will not be the last.

While I could understand resistance (on both sides actually) to the creation of a Bit Torrent Top 40, I think it would be a valuable tool.  Media corporations would scoff that such a list would legitimize digital piracy while the pirates would look unkindly on any kind of monitoring of their activity, anonymous as the posted results might be.  But, as the good folks at Warner Bros. seem to think, that list indicates what tech-savvy, early adopting, niche-enthusiasts are willing to spend their time hunting down. 

And, yes, that list would be equivalent to posting a list of the most stolen physical CD’s or DVD’s but, honestly, wouldn’t that list tell us something, too?