The wonder of viral sharing

Indie film producer thanks pirates for downloading his movie
Posted by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing
Eric D. Wilkinson, producer of the independent film "Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth," has written a letter to the editor of Releaselog, a site that reviews leaked movies available on P2P networks. He hasn't written to complain, mind -- he wrote in to say how much promotional value the piracy of his movie on P2P has generated, and how that's turning into real sales for him.

"I am sending you this email after realizing that our website has had nearly 23,000 hits in the last 12 days, much of it coming from your website. In addition, our trailer, both on the www.manfromearth.com site and other sites like YouTube, MySpace and AOL has been watched nearly 20,000 times AND what’s most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from being the 11,235th most popular movie, to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks (we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction film on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites (well, four words and a slash). "

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And it isn't a bad thing. If you have a quality product and aren't afraid to use the power of voices and community, a lot more positive than negative can happen.
A lot of people may pirate, but a lot of people still buy. You may not get all the $600 trillion zillion you intended, but getting half of that still isn't bad. It's almost as if you spent those pirated funds you could have made on your PR efforts, but didn't really, but did...