The last episodes of drama/thriller/mystery TV series LOST have managed to shatter BitTorrent transfer records, as fans of the series rush to illegally download and view the show before the series is (inevitably) spoiled for them.

That simultaneous broadcast doesn't seem to have worked as well as they'd hoped...

According to the folks at TorrentFreak, who’ve been watching BitTorrent traffic like a pack of hawks, the last two episodes of Lost, which aired as a single, feature length episode, have seen a tremendous amount of traffic over the various illegal filesharing networks, breaking records for content downloaded via Bittorrent. The figure that they’ve come to expect for the show is around 6 million downloads for a single episode. They go on to point out that the average episode of LOST will be downloaded in the region of 1.5 million times in the first week after it’s aired.

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Ireland’s largest internet service provider (ISP), Eircom, will today be introducing what’s been called a “three strikes” approach to filesharing that will see repeat offenders cut off.

Hard to tell what they're trying to signify, but it's a great shot.

The ‘three strikes’ rule was first discussed during the legal battle between Eircom and a number of publishers including Sony, EMI, universal and Warner, with labels pushing for a graduated response from Eircom. The case came just after Eircom advertisements appeared on the Pirate Bay’s homepage. In September of last year, Eircom agreed to block its users from visiting the Pirate Bay, and eventually drew up the graduated response system that’s come to be known as the three strikes rule.

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It seems that Rapidshare has broken its losing streak on legal fights this week, with word that the file hosting company has won its most recent case in the US.

Word of the victory comes via the ZeroPaid, and marks the first victory after a string of defeats for file hosting company Rapidshare, which has recently lost out both to book and music publishers. In both cases, the company has been made to remove files whose names correspond to the offending content, with Rapidshare promising to ‘actively’ police its content. Rumour has it that the service has also contacted some users who it believes have uploaded copyrighted content, threatening to cancel accounts.

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The Pirate Party UK has just launched its 2010 election manifesto in an attempt to better outline some of its positions and just what it aims to do if it manages to gain itself some power.

This will forever be my go to image for piracy

While prospect of a Swedish Pirate Party was something looked at a little snidely when it first appeared four years ago, the UK’s own Pirate Party has since grown up, and it looks to be making a serious effort this year. Of course, as with any of the various Pirate Parties that have been formed, the thing that most will be interested in is just what kind of policy they’re hoping to bring into play, and on that front, it’s always nice to peruse the manifesto and see what they’re all about. Fortunately, given the world’s gradually sliding attention spans, this manifesto is relatively short…

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LG may well find itself in some trouble with studios after its user manuals were found to contain details of how to watch illegally downloaded material on LG’s hardware.

Seems like a bit of a misstep...

The whole kafuffle stems from the release of a line of HDTV’s from LG that boast USB ports, allowing users to plug external storage directly into their displays and watch any content that they’ve got stored on those drives directly on their LG TV. Of course, the assumption might be that such content has been legally obtained, but LG’s own manual doesn’t seem too fussy, showing pirated content in its diagrams of the functionality.

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It seems that France’s controversial three-strikes law for copyright offenders is being enforced by a body that doesn’t care too much for copyright itself… with the group’s logo infringing one copyright already.

According to the folks at TorrentFreak, the Hadopi group’s logo makes use of a font that wasn’t licensed for use in its logo. Moreover, the font itself isn’t just not licensed to them, but, having been developed by staff in-house at France Telecom, it seems that the font can’t legally be licensed for use by anyone outside the company. Indeed, they managed to get some time to talk to the man who made the font itself, Jean-Francois Porchez.

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Nokia and Apple have been tearing into one another in the courts lately, with Nokia launching yet another salvo against Apple this week, alleging further patent infringement on mobile devices.

The whole kafuffle began when Nokia alleged that Apple had infringed no fewer than ten patents it had filed with relation to the various bits and pieces of hardware that make up its by now well established iPhone. Apple’s response was to counter-sue Nokia for a raft of different patents that it filed for the iPhone and felt Nokia had since infringed. Now, it seems, the case continues, with Nokia filing further claims of infringement.

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While there will always be awards and ceremonies, there are all kinds of ways to see what the top movies of any given year were, not least of which the movies that have been pirated the most.

TorrentFreak has posted a list of the top ten most pirated movies of this year, and while we’ve seen some fairly massive releases over the course of the year, you might be interested to see what did and what didn’t make the big list. So, while the critics are sure to have already decided what the best films of this year were, the list of the top ten most pirated movies is a very democratic one… though those in the movie industry would likely estimate it to be a democracy of thieves.

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Microsoft has apologised to social networking site Plurk after it emerged that Microsoft China’s Juku service contained a significant amount of code that appeared to be ripped directly from Plurk’s own service.

Word emerged via the Plurk blog yesterday that Microsoft’s Juku social networking service in China copied not only its design and UI directly from Plurk’s own, but that the code for the two sites was “eerily similar.” Plurk’s word on the situation was that it was, generally speaking, not too bothered by imitators, but when it came to Microsoft’s offering the whole affair was a little too much to let slide.

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In a genuinely bizarre turn of events, it seems as though renewed attempts to have file sharing haven and practical Mos Eisley of the internet, The Pirate Bay, shut down have pushed the site into a position where it could be impossible to do so.

There’s a very lengthy write-up of the history leading to the most changes to the Pirate Bay’s structure over at TorrentFreak, but the long and short of it is that the fact that the Pirate Bay no longer boasts its own tracker could well have done an awful lot to shake up the cases against the illegal filesharing service. For one, it could well mean that the current cases being fought in Sweden don’t mean quite as much, with the site in question now entirely outside of Sweden.

Repeated attempts to disconnect the Pirate Bay have seen the site move around so much, geographically, that it was eventually carried out of its home country. Those individuals behind the Pirate Bay itself are now quite a bit outside of Sweden’s jurisdiction, with Frederik Neij safely holed up in Thailand while Gottfrid Svartholm is, apparently, spending his time in Cambodia.

Neij was good enough to comment on the current situation of the Pirate Bay last week when he said that,

“I am wondering if Swedish law has the power to issue a prohibition or penalty against a website in another country and my adopted acts in another country with a website that does not exist in Sweden.”

Certainly, it’s an interesting question, but the fact is that there’s an awful lot of money behind the case against the Pirate Bay, and it seems entirely likely that the case will be pursued as far as it possibly can be. Still, the whole thing is very interesting, given the lengths to which the copyright holders involved have gone to in shutting down the whole thing down.

For those interested in reading (an awful lot) more on the topic, the TorrentFreak article on the current state of the Pirate Bay has much more detail.

After years of managing to stave off legal action, major torrent site Mininova has been force to take down just about all of its trackers after losing a legal fight with a Dutch organisation representing copyright holders.

The move, alongside the continuing fall-apart state of The Pirate Bay, seems to indicate that copyright holders are certainly making some major headway against internet-based piracy. Of course, things are a little different for Mininova and The Pirate Bay… for one, those behind the day-to-day operation of The Pirate Bay never really made any profit off their work, but the brains behind Mininova were in quite a different situation.

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A lawyer who has worked cases against peer-to-peer filesharers accused of infringing Viacom copyrights has admitted to a group of law students that the process “felt like terrorism.”

According to ArsTechnica Viacom general counsel, Michael Fricklas, had some very choice words indeed about just how it feels to be in the opposite position to the one in which many internet users fear they might one day end up. During his speech to students at Yale, Fricklas described the process of pursuing internet users accused of piracy as “expensive, and it’s painful, and it feels like bullying.”

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