Slate… is running an article on the lack of pirated Sundance films:

Sundance films, present and past, simply do not register in the online pirate world—unless they are one of the few that have already made it big (like Clerks or Little Miss Sunshine). This
proves two things: When it comes to content piracy, obscurity, not security, is the best defense. It also demonstrates that movie pirates are fundamentally parasitic, not predatory.

Shame on them! This is a classic example of mistaking correlation for causality. The relationship of independent movies to pirated ones does not imply that an increase in interest in the movie will lead it
to be pirated, nor that pirated movies garner increased exposure. It is just as likely (probably more so)
that the cause is due to a lack of availabilty rather than of interest.

By the same token, it is also incorrect to presume that there is some code of ethics at play here, that somehow the pirates have some respect or solidarity towards independent film producers. Nope, it is
likely that they just haven’t got their hands on a DVD. After all, why hasn’t Slate commented on the complete and utter lack of distribution across legal channels? Or the fact that Sundance films tend to show up on the IMDB radar for a very short amount of time (peaking during the festival itself) before plummeting into the nether-moviemeter-ratings for good?

Moreover, the logic employed to determine the proliferation of pirated material is also flawed: you cannot gauge the number of people pirating a given film by simply counting the number of hits on The
Pirate Bay. There are many other piracy outlets which would need to be factored, many of which cannot be measured directly, such as the simple act of an owner of a DVD making a copy for her friend.

But what all of this suggests to me is that these independent movie producers are actually too “precious” about their films for them to get the exposure they crave. After all, if their primary concern is exposure and proliferation of their work, why aren’t they pirating their own movies themselves?