Avatar has managed to break the record for the Blu-Ray movie release that’s seen most piracy since the format launched back in 2007.

Yesterday, it was widely reported that Avatar had managed to break the first day sales record set by The Dark Knight last week when it released last Tuesday. Impressively enough, Avatar’s success carried on, seeing it pass The Dark Knight’s total sales over eighteen months by Thursday. Of course, not all of the interest in James Cameron’s most recent record-breaking movie has taken the form of legitimate purchases of the movie on Blu-Ray. Indeed, it seems that Blu-Ray rips are seeing an unusually heavy degree of traffic.

Indeed, the word coming from the on-the-ball folks over at TorrentFreak is that the Blu-Ray rip of James Cameron’s Avatar has seen so many downloads in the first week since it hit BitTorrent sites that it’s well on its way to being the most illegally pirated Blu-Ray release of all time. Indeed, the figures themselves are very interesting indeed, with Avatar having been downloaded illegally around 200,000 times in the last four days.

Curiously enough, TorrentFreak attributes the unusually high number of downloads from the UK and Australia to the fact that the film was released later in both regions, which would certainly make some sense, though given the sheer size of a Blu-Ray rip, it seems as though many would be better off just waiting…

Avatar has, despite the fact that the movie was available in 3D, seen some fairly hefty piracy since its cinema release, and, with that in mind, the news that it’s now seeing an unusually high amount of illegal traffic is, perhaps, unsurprising. Still, it’s interesting to see the piracy charts mirror the sales charts so closely.