Hail Mary some may say with news that The Interview has grossed over $15 million via VOD, but what others will miss is that the figure should actually have been far higher.

Here’s the word of the day to describe why Sony is even more stupid than you think: georetardation, noun: artificially crippling the distribution of a digital good via geographic restrictions.

So Sony distributed The Interview online, but that distribution was myopic in that it was only released in the United States. Live 3 feet into Canada and want to legally rent it? Tough luck said Sony, and so the only alternative was piracy.

There are now figures that show the piracy of a movie with unprecedented exposure came primarily outside of the United States, with Torrent Freak reporting that “the vast majority of these downloads originate from outside the U.S. where the comedy isn’t available through legal channels.”

“The data…reveals that most of the pirates come from parts of the world where there’s no legal avenue to see the film. With 17.6% the United States is still leading the list, but this isn’t a big surprise considering the size of its population” the report stated.

Naturally the anglosphere countries came out as top downloaders, but notably per head of population The Netherlands also put in a good showing.

People wanted to see the movie, and Sony didn’t give them a legal venue to do so.

The chattering classes who tut tut piracy will immediately point out that the movie would have been pirated anyway, and they would actually be right; no matter how many legal avenues of consumption are available, some people will always pirate content.

But here we conversely have an example where a movie sold digitally upfront has gone extremely well…where it was legally available for purchase.

People embrace legal content where it is both available and sold at a reasonable price. Take the music industry for example, where rampant piracy has faded away as people flock to services like those provided by Spotify Ltd, Pandora Media Inc. and others. As Google so eloquently puts it, “online piracy is primarily an availability and pricing problem.”

Sony could have released The Interview globally online and it didn’t, and it’s their financial loss not ours. Stupid is as stupid does spoke Forest Gump, and here in lies the case with Sony.

Image credit: Nine Network Australia/ WIN Television