The source of the online leak of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight has been traced to an awards-season DVD screener that had been sent to a leading Hollywood studio executive.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the pirated version of The Hateful Eight available from some file-sharing sites bears a digital watermark that identifies it as a DVD sent to Andrew Kosove, co-CEO of Alcon Entertainment, a major production and finance outfit involved in films such as The 33, Transcendence and the recent remake of Point Break.
Kosove, who is co-operating fully with the FBI agents investigating the leak, denied the DVD ever reached him. “I’ve never seen this DVD,” he said. “It’s never touched my hands. We’re going to do more than co-operate with the FBI. We’re going to conduct our own investigation to find out what happened.”
According to information cited by the Reporter, the DVD was uploaded to the internet by a hacker collective called Hive-CM8, and was downloaded at least 200,000 times on its first day. CM8 say they plan to upload 40 DVD screeners in total, and have also posted pirated versions of The Revenant, Creed and Legend.
Despite increased security measures, the awards season organisers have so far failed to curtail the leaking of films that are sent to voters on DVD. In 2004, Godfather actor Carmine Caridi was ordered to pay Warner Bros $300,000 (£205,000) and expelled from the Academy after films leaked online were traced to DVDs he had received.
