Piracy has been a thorn in the side of the movie industry for many years now, and doesn't appear to be letting up in any sort of meaningful way. While people pirate films for many different reasons, a new report from the Washington Post, based on data from PiracyData.org, suggests that one of those reasons could be the lack of legal availability.

The report says that PiracyData collated information on the most pirated films from TorrentFreak with data from legitimate digital distribution search engine CanIStreamIt, and found that many of the most popular films apparently aren't readily available through legal means.

Referring to the most pirated movies, the site said that in last week's results (seen below) "not a single film was available from streaming from services like Netflix or Amazon Prime," and that only three of the top ten films including The Lone Ranger, After Earth, and This is the End were available for rental online at the time of the study. Furthermore, the site says that only six of the top ten films, those being Pacific Rim, The Internship, The Lone Ranger, Monsters University, After Earth, and This Is the End, were available to purchase online.

PiracyData says that over the past three weeks, 53% of the most-pirated films have been available through legal digital distribution and over the same period, only 20% have been available to stream or rent.

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