Image: Columbia Pictures
A movie piracy release group called Hive-CM8 says it's planning to leak no fewer than 40 top Hollywood movies over the next few weeks.Several of the highest-profile films of the year, including recent releases like Will Smith drama Concussion, Creed, Joy, and Steve Jobs, are among the films already available to download on various piracy sites."Will do them all one after another, 9th hot title," reads the documentation accompanying the most recently leaked film, Spotlight, which was leaked overnight on Thursday, according to a search of the Usenet indexing site NZBIndex.nl. (Usenet, which predates the web, is kind of like a giant message board, but with the ability to easily and quickly share large files.) The leaked movies are all high-quality DVD screeners, which are copies of a film sent to people like journalists and other movie industry professionals for evaluation purposes.Given the existence of invite-only BitTorrent sites, Megaupload-like online storage lockers, private IRC channels, and the aforementioned Usenet, there's no real way to determine exactly how many times a movie has been illegally downloaded, but one anti-piracy firm called Excipio estimates The Hateful Eight had been downloaded more than 1.3 million times within its first 24 hours of availability.The release group Hive-CM8, whose slogan appears to be "doing it right the first time," has been around for at least five years, with versions of films like The Social Network, The Hobbit, 12 Years a Slave, and Interstellar all having been leaked by the group.