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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In an effort to curb the seemingly inevitable high degree of piracy of the last episode of the last season of Lost, Sky has announced that it is to broadcast the show simultaneous to its being shown in the US on Monday morning.

According to a report from the Guardian, Sky is hoping that the move will see viewers deciding to stay up until 5am to watch the last episode of what we’re assured is to be the last season of Lost. Of course, it being such a big event, a standard episode just wouldn’t cut it, so instead they’ve opted to go with a somewhat more drawn out affair. Instead of the usual 40-45 minutes plus ads, the show is set to last a fairly staggering two and a half hours.

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Filesharing giant The Pirate Bay has been downed once again by continued legal pressure applied not only to the site itself, but to the companies responsible for its hosting, by movie studios.

Despite continued legal action, it seems the Pirate Bay is still going strong.

This isn’t the first time that legal fights have made their way not only to the Pirate Bay itself but to its hosting. With the site’s founders having long since scattered to the four corners of the earth, having lost their case in Sweden and currently awaiting an appeal (or a mistrial, depending on whether or not it’s found that the judge on the case having had ties to pro-copyright organisations constitutes a bias) ensuring the site has trouble finding hosting is an approach that’s met with some success in the past. After the last court proceedings against a company hosting The Pirate Bay, the site was shuffled around for a few days, before eventually updating to say that it had moved to a ‘secure bunker’ in the east.

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It seems that Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar has released a copy of Max Payne 2 for Steam that makes use of a no-CD crack released by pirating group Myth.

This is going to make the next antipiracy campaign a hard sell...

Word of the misappropriated code comes via Steam forum user Liamaj, who, for one reason or another, saw fit to open the maxpayne2.exe that was downloaded when he bought Rockstar’s Max Payne 2 through Steam’s digital delivery service in a hex editor. The file itself was revealed to contain the Myth logo in ascii, a fairly telltale sign indeed that the code may not have originated within Rockstar itself.

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Software piracy is continuing to rise across the world, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The industry body says that losses from software piracy amounted to $51.4 billion (€40.4 billion) in 2009.

The BBC says the report (which you can see in full here) singled out computer users in the Asia Pacific region as the source of the biggest losses in the world. But, it says, there are also positive signs, as the rate of piracy declined in more than 50 countries, and rose in only 19.

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Rapidshare has begun sending legal threats to sites that use the service’s name to popularise the fact that the service can be, and often is, used to aid the proliferation of pirated media, asking not only that they stop trading on Rapidshare’s name but also that they cease operating altogether.

Rapidshare has been under increasing pressure from rights holders

Generally, when you hear the words ‘Rapidshare’ and ‘abuse’ in the same sentence, it tends to be in reference to the profligate copyright abuses carried out by users of the service, but in this case, Rapidshare is moving to prevent its name being used to encourage the kind of illegal piracy that’s been conducted across its service for years now. Word of the move to block illegal uses of the service comes from TorrentFreak, which also managed to get in touch with the founder of Rapid.org, a forum on which links (usually Rapidshare) to copyrighted content are shared, who said of the move from Rapidshare,

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It seems that the usually noisy business of taking on those accused of illegal downloading copyrighted content has quieted down, with reports indicating that anti-piracy litigation is taking a far quieter tack now.

Seems that a quiet anti-piracy campaign could do far better than the noisy ones...

According to an article from the Hollywood Reporter, the lawsuits were filed by the US Copyright Group, which is acting on the behalf of a number of independent film producers and ‘with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance.’ The biggest difference here is that this doesn’t seem to be the usual noise and fury campaign to strike terror into the hearts of would-be illegal downloaders everywhere. Instead, the whole campaign seems to be proceeding fairly quietly, which might be better off, considering the fact that coverage of such cases generally tends to be a fairly negative affair.

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Sony has announced that it is to drop support for Linux on the first of April, with the rollout of a firmware update.

The PS3 Slim simply never featured the ability to install another OS...

Word of the move comes from a blog posting from Sony’s head of PR, Charlotte Panther, in which it’s revealed that the Install Other OS option for the PlayStation 3, which had allowed users and businesses to run Linux installs on the device, will be disappearing due to ‘security concerns.’ It’s hard not to wonder at this stage if this move comes as a result of the recent movement from George Holtz, the man behind the first iPhone jailbreaking tools, who recently claimed that he had hacked Sony’s home console.

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File sharing service Rapidshare has made the move to start closing the accounts of users found to be illegally downloading copyrighted content, and logging the offenders’ IP addresses ‘for legal purposes.’

It's hard to think what else Rapidshare is actually used for... sadly.

Apparently ambivalent to just what kind of content was being uploaded, Rapidshare has long been a haven for illegal file sharers, its relatively fast speeds allowing for sharing of small to medium files with a minimum of hassle, and avoiding the issues that rarer files encounter on torrent sites by being constantly available. Indeed, according to TorrentFreak, Rapidshare has managed to climb swiftly, becoming one of the top fifty most used websites on earth.

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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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It seems that Ubisoft’s heavy-handed approach to digital rights management (DRM to you and I) has come under heavier fire than the publisher had initially expected, with the anti-piracy servers for two of the company’s latest titles being hacked.

No Assassin's Creed 2 on days when hackers get unruly...

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, it emerged last week that Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC (as well as the submarine chasing Silent Hunter 5) would require users to have a connection not only when they initially register the game, nor when they launch it, but throughout their play of the titles. While this might not seem like too much of a headache, the fact that the game boots players if they lose their internet connection has raised hackles.

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It seems that Google has dropped torrent site BTJunkie from its search results after having received a request from Fox which specifically mentioned a torrent of box office record breaking movie Avatar.

It's hard to see Google adding BTJunkie again until Avatar drops from the main page...

The removal of BTJunkie from Google’s search results isn’t the first time Google has made the move to entirely disappear a torrent site from its search pages, as TorrentFreak is quick to point out. Last year, Google did very much the same thing to file sharing giant The Pirate Bay, though it later admitted that removing the entirety of The Pirate Bay from its search results was an error… it’ll be interesting to see if the same is true of this latest removal.

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