'Extended' Harry Potter Preview Leaks to Torrent Sites

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 17 Nov 2010

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is one of the most anticipated movies of the season. I’m sure that by now fans have already seen the trailer and are eagerly awaiting the movie’s official release (set for the 19th of November in the US). They will be glad to know that an “extended” trailer has been leaked to torrent sites.

It’s not an actual trailer, hence the quotation marks. The first 36 minutes of the latest Harry Potter movie are now floating around torrent sites. This news reaches us via Ernesto Van der Sar, founder of TorrentFreak which, in case you did not already know this, is a site that specializes in everything torrent-related.

The 36minutes are expected to be downloaded by hundreds of thousand of users. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is in such big demand right now that it climbed to the #1 spot on the list of the most searched movies – on some torrent sites.

The 36 minutes of film are believed to be part of partial DVD screener. The watermarks and other screener features give it away as a DVD screener; the fact that it’s not the full movie tells us it’s only a partial screener. TorrentFreak suspects that it “may have been intentionally time-limited because the studio feared a leak.”

As you can imagine, Warner Bros. was not exactly pleased that 36 minutes of a movie that is expected to gross over a billion dollars has been leaked online. Warner Bros. said the following in a statement for Wired.com: “This constitutes a serious breach of copyright violation and theft of Warner Bros. property. We are working actively to restrict and/or remove copies that may be available. Also, we are vigorously investigating this matter and will prosecute those involved to the full extent of the law.”

What Warner fails to realize is that this may be beneficial for the movie. If people download the 36 minutes and they like what they see, they will most likely go see the movie in the theaters. There is no full version of the movie on torrent sites right now and the movie is set to be launched two days from now. So if you saw 36 minutes and liked what you saw, will you be willing to wait until the full version is released to torrent sites, or will you go see the movie in the theaters this Friday.


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