News: District 9: Favoured by Pirates!

Although the Hurt Locker might have taken home the majority of the Little Yellow Men from the Academy Awards last night, sci-fi surprise District 9 was crowned the years favourite – among pirates.

That’s right: according to TorrentFreak, which calculated which film would win were every download via BitTorrent counted as one vote, District 9 beat the competition hands down with 12, 639, 000 downloads worldwide.

Neill Blomkamp’s part b-grade alien romp, part incisive apartheid satire even triumphed over last year’s biggest b-grade alien romp, Avatar, which managed only 11,326,000.

Best Picture and Best Director winner, The Hurt Locker made an appearance at distant third, with only 7,930,000 bothering to download it completely free of charge.

TorrentFreak says it collected data from all the large BitTorrent trackers, and included every available release, including ‘cammed’ versions, which are generally god-awful.

While District 9 walks away with this year’s honours and no doubt Sony Pictures will be thrilled, it’s you, the internet that’s the real winner. Congratulations, guys!