How? If the copyright holder is releasing it for redistribution, then I fail to see how redistribution under their terms could be considered unauthorized, unless the DVD is higher quality and someone rips that and torrents it, in which case Paramount will have a legitimate case since they only authorized the lower-quality version for torrent distribution.
I think their goal on this is simple. I suspect Paramount wants this movie to have absolutely abysmal DVD sales. That way, they can point at the sales figures and say "see? (very_high_percentage) of people will not buy something if it's available for free!" I also bet the DVD will be expensive to make sure this happens.
Either that, or Paramount is truly trying to see how well .torrents do for distribution (maybe the .torrent will be a lower-resolution version with a quick splash screen saying "if you want this in higher quality, please buy the DVD!").
One interesting business model might be to charge some very nominal fee (say $1-2) for a copy of the .torrent file. Their distribution costs are near zero, so any sales that way are pretty much pure profit. This dovetails in with the "lower the price, reduce piracy" discussion from the other day, and gives would-be pirates a way to go legit while building collections of movies.
There will certainly be some (maybe a lot, hard to say) redistribution of the .torrent file, but it'd be interesting to see what would happen with something like this. Would you sell enough zero-overhead copies of the movie at a buck a pop to make up for your $10 per-unit profit on the DVD release? I have exactly 10 movies in my DVD collection, but if you offered me movies at $1-2 a pop I'd probably own several hundred. They'd be impulse purchases, and I wouldn't think twice about buying a movie to watch once.
I think they'd make some good money on it. Especially with older movies that already sell for a few bucks on the bent can rack at Wally World, most of which has to be eaten up by distribution and materials costs. If you didn't care about liner art and packaging, would you pirate it or cough up 75 cents for the .torrent file and a legit license to it?
I think there's some interesting possibilities in this business model. I don't pirate, but I also don't buy a lot of music because it's overpriced in my opinion. I might buy 30 bucks (2-3 albums) in music a year.
When "all of mp3" came out, I bought TONS of music at about 25 cents a song. I probably dropped $150 in the first year. Many turned out to be music I didn't like, but at 25 cents a song I'll take that risk and work on building collections, because it's easier to download a bunch of stuff and spend a little money than wasting my time picking out individual songs to save money. I'd also spend 10 cents each to download a few sample songs for an artist in 128k, then turn around a day later and spend another 25 cents a song on their entire collection at a decent bitrate if I liked the samples.