The release of the summer's first blockbuster movies has sparked an unprecedented frenzy of film piracy, sending nearly 10 million people online to download bootleg copies of Spider-Man or Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones.
Even as box-office sales soar - with the top 12 movies grossing a record $193 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend - Internet film piracy is growing even faster, according to a new report from Viant, a Boston-based digital research and consulting firm.
As many as 400,000 to 600,000 illicit copies of films are downloaded every day - a 20 percent increase over a year ago.
"It's getting clear - alarmingly clear, I might add - that we are in the midst of the possibility of Armageddon," said Jack Valenti, president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America.
The film industry has kept a wary eye on online piracy since Napster popularized music file-swapping three years ago - and made it possible for millions of strangers to freely exchange billions of bootleg songs. A new generation of file-swapping services - including Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire and iMesh - has allowed computer users to find and trade movie files with similar ease.
Much of the activity is on Internet Relay Chat - a sophisticated network of servers that requires users to know pass codes and basic code language and offer something to barter as the price of admission. Traffic on IRC swelled to 2.5 million users, about five times the norm, said Andrew Frank, Viant's chief technical officer. IRC is considered a place where hard-core pirates hang out and swap wares.
The vast majority of the bootleg activity, however, is occurring on well-known file-swapping sites.
Indeed, traffic spiked 300 percent during the weekend of May 11, when trading of grainy, jerky illicit "cam" versions of the films - captured by a video camera at prerelease screenings - became widespread.
That doesn't take into account file trading done directly over instant-messaging services provided by America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft; or on college campuses, where a single bootleg copy sitting on the campus network could potentially serve thousands of students.
"Only two out of 10 movies ever get their money back from theatrical exhibition," Valenti said. "Eight out of 10 have to go to airlines, to hotels, to Blockbuster, to HBO, then to basic cable - to get their money back," he said. "If you are ambushed in the early days of your theatrical exhibition, the chances of you recouping in a world that is mostly broadband would be very, very different."
Frank estimates only one in four people who tried to download illicit copies of these movies were successful. Attack of the Clones, for instance, requires more than six hours to download over a high-speed Internet connection.
And in the case of Morpheus, where a search term such as "Spider-Man" doesn't always get what was expected - the movie could be mislabeled, blank or missing audio.