The Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt RED estimates that 4.5 million copies of its action-RPG have been pirated. The game has sold 1 million copies through various channels. Speaking to PC Gamer, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski said that the number is also a conservative number.

Left-leaning political blog DailyKOS joins the editorial pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times in opposition of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate's Protect IP Act. In a post titled "Congress is close to destroying the internet (no hyperbole)," DailyKOS says that it is not hyperbole when they say that lawmakers, big Pharmaceutical companies, and the recording, and movie industries are out to destroy the internet.

While Americans were enjoying Thanksgiving last Thursday Australia's Internet service providers held a meeting to come to a consensus on how to deal with illegal file-sharing in the country.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking up arms against the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and they want your help to do it. The advocacy that supports internet rights and freedom of speech online says that these new bills are "a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill" and that this legislation "invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation."

The Texas family court judge who was shown whipping his teenage daughter in a YouTube video has been suspended by the Texas Supreme Court. The seven and a half minute video was from a 2004 incident. It showed Judge William Adams viciously beating his daughter with a belt because she downloaded illegal music and games from the Internet. In rendering its decision, the court did not detail the reason for the order of suspension that was made public Tuesday.

According to a new report on Net Neutrality from Sweden users of mobile broadband services will be sad to hear that not all of their traffic is being treated fairly. While most internet traffic is left unhindered, a report from the organization responsible for Sweden’s .SE national domain reveals that some operators have been systematically slowing down BitTorrent transfers, while others are blocking them altogether.

Illegal downloads of game software has increased in the United Kingdom, according to new data released by research firm Envisional. The firm claims that "illicit game downloads" in the UK climbed 20 percent over the last five years and that the five top games of 2010 were illegally accessed online almost one million times. The firm did not name the five games it claimed were downloaded millions of times.

In the summer of this year law enforcement agencies in several European countries conducted raids and made arrests related to movie streaming links portal Kino.to and file-hosting sites such as Duckload.com. Duckload lost 400 servers to police, worth more than 2 million dollars in total. While police managed to nab most of the targets they were looking for one man managed to escape apprehension. The net has finally fallen on that man. After five months of evading police the man known believed to be Tim C has been arrested in Germany.

This week British Telecom (BT) began a court ordered block of Newzbin 2. Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates “illegally copied material" commonly shared in Usenet discussion forums. The site is being blocked thanks to the legal actions of the Motion Picture Association, who managed to get a UK court to block the site. The MPA describes Newzbin as a "criminal organization whose business model is based on wholesale copyright infringement". Newzbin likely has a similar opinion of the MPA and organizations like it.

A Texas Family Court judge is now under investigation by the state's top law enforcement agency - the Texas Rangers - after a video surfaced of him beating his 16-year-old daughter Hillary Adams for downloading music and games from the Internet. The video was shot in 2004, but someone claiming to be his daughter posted the video on YouTube on October 27. The Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams was running for re-election.

File-sharing software company FrostWire has settled its dispute with the Federal Trade Commission and called the agency's complaint against them as the best bug report the company has ever gotten. The FTC filed a complaint against FrostWire in federal court saying that it was disregarding the privacy of its users by making freshly downloaded files in the program publicly shared when completed by default. But the FrostWire team approached the court case in a way most companies wouldn't.

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research claims that BitTorrent users may actually make ISP's money. For two years researchers monitored a sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. They found that (aside from showing that BitTorrent users downloaded an increasingly large amount of data) large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic. The goal of the research was to determine the impact of BitTorrent usage on networks, in terms of traffic and the costs.

Taking a cue from North American lawmakers, politicians in the United Kingdom are planning on creating laws to deal with supposed illegal streaming of copyrighted content. The warning came from UK Communications Minister Ed Vaizey in a speech at the Intellect Consumer Electronics in London. In that speech Vaizey said that a "voluntary code of practice" being drawn up by US ISPs and content owners might be a "game-changer" in other countries. And by other countries, he means his country.

"If people are streaming live football without permission we should look at ways we can stop them," he said. "People have the right to earn money from content they create."

While he remained silent on what was decided or discussed at last week's meeting between ISPs and content providers to discuss website blocking, he did say that what is going on in the United States is "leading the way."

Earlier this month a report from the United Nations condemned the use of "three strikes" rules that inevitably lead to file-sharers being disconnected from the Internet for a period of time. The report said that Internet access is a basic right of every man and that taking that right away is a human rights violation.

Last Friday several countries agreed with that report's findings and formerly endorsed it. Last week Sweden made remarks before the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the bulk of the report's findings, including the harsh criticism of three strikes rules. The surprise was that the statement was signed by 40 other countries including the United States, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, India, Japan, Poland, Turkey, and even New Zealand.

The United Kingdom and France, who have "three strikes" laws on the books to deal with file-sharers, did not sign the statement.

The United Nations adopted a report today that says that disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet is a violation of human rights. The Report of the Special Rapporteur was published in May. The report focused on the protection of freedom of opinion and expression, and moves by various governments to take away an individual’s Internet access.

"While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, States have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely," read the report.

The report goes on to say that various anti-file-sharing laws violate international law:

The new head of the U.S. Copyright Office says that illegal video streaming should be a felony. The new Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante spent her first day testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, giving her approval to the IP Enforcement Czar’s recommendation that the government should stop treating illegal streaming offenses as "unauthorized performances" and start classifying it as a serious crime, or "unauthorized reproductions and distributions." The White House backs the IP Czar's recommendations. This would turn illegal streaming into a felony - up from a less serious misdemeanor charge.

Pallante said the following before the House Judiciary Committee hearing:

While some judges are perfectly content to listen to arguments from lawyers representing the entertainment industry that are far-fetched and convoluted, it seems that a growing number of federal judges are getting tired of the modus operandi of firms involving thousands of defendants who lawsuit filers don't even have real names for. One federal judge has had enough of the John Doe filings in his court.

On May 4 attorney John Steele filed a case on behalf of New York-based Boy Racer, a niche porn company, over alleged file-sharing of its film L.A. Pink. The case was randomly assigned to Judge Milton Shadur out of the Illinois District court. Two days later Steele, apparently seeing the weakness in the case, decided to ask for a dismissal. This rubbed the judge the wrong way and he let the attorney know in the strongest terms possible.

The judge issued a memorandum order that opened with the following:

From the this-is-probably-a-conflict-of-interest-department comes a story from TorrentFreak on U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell. Apparently, before she was a U.S. District Court judge, Howell was a Recording Industry Association of America lobbyist and helped with the DMCA.

Howell’s resume shows that she is very familiar with U.S. copyright laws. In fact, she may have helped write some of them. She served as General Counsel of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and helped draft several prominent intellectual property protection laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Deterrence Act and the No Electronic Theft Act - according to TorrentFreak.

TorrentFreak says that a new report about the costs of piracy to various industries is overblown and in some cases an outright manipulation of numbers. Reports on piracy do tend to be overblown, or at the very least hard to substantiate because they tend to contain a lot of industry estimates. In other words, it is a lot harder to track the activities of pirates and file-sharers than it is to track sales. Hell, the games industry cannot even accurately track digital sales because it doesn't have the full access it needs (they are at least working on it, according to NPD and UKIE).

According to a report on UK-based Computer & Video Games, Epic Games and People Can Fly's Bulletstorm has been leaked onto Torrent sites around the world this morning. According to the site, full beta code of the game for Xbox 360 is being downloaded from file-sharers and played - according to online chatter from pirates.

While this is not an uncommon occurrence ahead of a world-wide game release, it is probably disconcerting to the game’s developers and publishing partner EA. Earlier this week Crysis 2 and Killzone 3 were leaked to file-sharing sites.

Get the real thing next week. Bulletstorm is due for release for Xbox 360, Windows PC, and PS3 February 22 in North America and February 25 in Europe.

The Recording Industry Association of America and its partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance recently submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. The RIAA pointed to two countries as being the worst of the worst when it comes to intellectual property theft: Spain and our comrades to the north - Canada.

This is particularly interesting because this week Spain passed a tough new law to combat piracy. The Sinde law (nicknamed for its sponsor) is aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites that traffic in illegal downloads. Even though the public and some in the Spanish movie industry opposed the law, it will become the rule of the land by summer, says TorrentFreak. But the RIAA claims this is just a baby step and that even more needs to be done to combat theft.

A case started by porn king Larry Flynt that targeted thousands of John Doe defendants has been tossed out of court, creating a potential problem for lawyers representing the entertainment industry's fight against file-sharers. Last year Larry Flynt Publications filed lawsuits against thousands of anonymous defendants for a porn parody film called "This Ain't Avatar XXX." The problem for lawyers representing the company was that ISP Time Warner was reticent to reveal the real identities of the IP owners lawyers had obtained. Without those real names, it was next to impossible to find out who exactly was illegally downloading and sharing the film.

Video game industry trade group the Entertainment Software Association claims that 54 percent of all illegal fileshares come from five nations on the International Intellectual Property Alliance's "watch list." These countries include Italy, Spain, China, Brazil and France. The group cites the "Special 301" report put together by IIPA. The ESA is a member of the group.

"Our industry continues to grow in the U.S., but epidemic levels of online piracy stunt sales and growth in a number of countries, including Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France, where we see crushing volumes of infringing peer-to-peer activity involving leading game titles," said ESA president and CEO Michael Gallagher.

While Crytek CEO Cervat Yerli expressed disappointment earlier this week concerning the leak of Crysis 2, he still has mad love for the PC gaming scene. Writing on the MyCrysis message boards, Yerli said that his deep disappointment in this week's events have been eclipsed by the kind words and support from the community:

"While we are deeply disappointed by these events, we are all completely overwhelmed by the support we have received from you, our community," said Yerli.

"We can assure you that PC gaming is very important to us and will always be important to Crytek in the future. We are all still focused on delivering a great gaming experience to our true and honest fans," he continued. "I hope you will enjoy Crysis 2 on PC, as we think it is our best PC game yet!"

According to a new study commissioned by the recently (Comcast) acquired NBC Universal and carried out by Envisonal, 23.8 percent of Internet traffic involves "digital theft." Of this 11.4 percent of this is done using the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.

Focusing on the United States, the study estimated that 17 percent of Internet traffic is engaging in "infringing activity," with BitTorrent traffic accounting for 9 percent of that number.

Envisional's analysis of the top 10,000 peer-to-peer "swarms" found that 99.24 percent of non-pornographic material being traded was copyrighted material.

Finally the study concluded that “infringing cyberlocker sites" accounted for 5.1 percent of global Internet traffic, while "infringing video streaming sites" made up around 1.4 percent of global traffic.

An interesting report from Ars Technica, citing a research paper (presented at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference last month in Philadelphia) from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid shows that around 25 percent of files downloaded from The Pirate Bay are fakes. Besides antipiracy companies seeding fake files into the mix, a fair share of the downloads are from hackers and other mischief makers looking to infect computers with viruses and Trojans.

From the article:

Swiss based cyberlocker company RapidShare is on the warpath this week after a research report from the brand protection company MarkMonitor branded it as the leading digital piracy site with 13 billion page visits a year. RapidShare says that it might sue.

The company is agitated by the report because it has worked hard over the last year to combat digital piracy by working closely with rights holders. The company even implemented a variety of take-down tools and measures similar to what YouTube uses.

When it had to, the company also went to court to clear its name: it has won cases in US and German courts. Those courts ruled that RapidShare is a "legal business." But those efforts have not stopped trade groups such as the RIAA and MPAA from marking RapidShare as one of the largest piracy havens. The research report from MarkMonitor simply throws gas on the fire.

iControlbits, a native iPhone app for the Transmission Mac OS BitTorrent client, has been released, though how long it will remain on Apple’s app store remains to be seen (Apple has an anti-Torrent app policy that it usually enforces with zeal).

To make BitTorrent downloads on one device accessible on others; all the major BitTorrent clients have developed web interfaces. These allow users to start, stop and pause downloads from wherever they are. Transmission, the favorite BitTorrent client of many Mac users, also has a web interface, albeit a limited one in the eyes of most iPhone and iPad owners.

With 2010 coming to end, movie downloaders are grabbing copies of TRON Legacy and Inception like 2011 is 2012. For the week ending December 26, the newest TRON movie was the most pirated film of the week, followed by Inception, The Tourist, Death Race 2 (really, people, really?) and Buried.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Social Network fell below the top 5 for the week. The full list below,, as compiled by TorrentFreak:

1 - TRON: Legacy
2 - Inception
3 - The Tourist
4 - Death Race 2
5 - Buried
6 - The Social Network
7 - Unstoppable
8 - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
9 - And Soon The Darkness
10 - Alpha and Omega

Source: TorrentFreak

TorrentFreak has compiled the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010, a list of the 100 most searched for phrases and keywords on KickassTorrents, one of the top ten most visited indexes on the internet. Using a few hundred million searches a year, TorrentFreak chronicled the most looked for items in the Torrent space.

The top search in the last 12 months was Inception, a movie that also appeared in the site's most pirated movies chart of the year. Four other titles made it into the top 10: Iron Man 2, Avatar, Despicable Me, and Clash of the Titans. Movie-related searches were the most popular among users of the site.