TorrentFreak

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.

In response to increasing legal actions and surveillance of Internet traffic, more and more file-sharers are choosing to hide their identities online. New data gathered through telephone interviews with thousands of adults reveals that in the US 15 percent of all file-sharers take measures to hide their IP-address. Some VPN and proxy providers have doubled their customer base in 2011, and this upward trend is bound to continue in the coming year.

BitTorrent is a great way to share large files with friends, family or even complete strangers, but it’s not always as convenient as it should be. Even though BitTorrent is more than a decade old there’s no site where users can simply dump torrents and get a fancy URL in return, so they can share with others. Until now that is, because the newly launched Tors.in just filled that gap.

Each and every day hundreds of millions of people scour their favorite BitTorrent search engines for content to download. But what are all these people looking for? Today we present the BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2011, a list of the 50 most searched for phrases and keywords on one of the most used public BitTorrent indexes during the past year.