TorrentFreak

You wouldn’t download a car, the Internet meme predicted. But if The Pirate Bay has its way that action will be a reality in the years to come. In preparation for this world-changing day, the world’s biggest torrent site has just premiered a new section containing the plans for physical items that can be downloaded then printed out. Today its a plastic pirate ship, but one tomorrow in a decade or two it may well be a car.

The French authority responsible for administering the country’s anti-filesharing operations reports that it has now sent out more than 736,000 “first strike” and 62,000 “second strike” infringement warnings, with a total of 165 Internet account holders now on their third and final strike. Meanwhile, a report set to be published by IFPI next week will suggest that Hadopi is a success that has contributed to a 22.5% increase in purchases from iTunes.

Anyone who understands The Pirate Bay, BitTorrent and the viral nature of file-sharing will appreciate just how difficult it is to have content taken down. So what can you do when previously private explicit photos of you appear online? For one young lady it seems that no effort was too big or too costly, as court papers from this fascinating case reveal.

Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have tried to get their beliefs recognized as an official religion in Sweden. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

Mid-December, data from YouHaveDownloaded was used to show that several illegal downloads had taken place in the palace of French President Sarkozy. These, however, were just the tip of the iceberg. More than 250 further IP addresses belonging to the French Ministry of Culture have now been linked to illegal downloads but the government, unsurprisingly, say they are completely innocent. OK, so prove it.

The year of Internet censorship wouldn’t be complete without the SOPA soap, the row between Megaupload and Universal, three-strikes plans and the countless other censorship attempts and anti-piracy actions that were carried out in the second half of the year. Luckily, there were also a few positive things to report on.

As 2011 comes to an end, we follow up our most pirated movies and TV-shows charts by taking a look at the most pirated games of the year. Crysis 2 comes out on top in the PC games category in 2011. On Xbox 360 Gears of War 3 receives the same honor, while Super Mario Galaxy 2 scoops the title of most pirated Wii game for the second year in a row.