While downloading and/or sharing copyrighted material is against the law in many countries, there are plenty of tools around to help people’s TV-torrenting habits. The new Chrome extension ‘SeriesGuide’ falls into this category.

SeriesGuide keeps track of people’s favorite TV-shows, which are then displayed in a calendar format, so users know when to tune in. In addition, it offers Pirate Bay download links for each episode, ranked by the number of seeders and leechers.

TF caught up with SeriesGuide’s developer who goes by the nickname SchizoDuckie. The developer says he coded the extension to fix a recurring problem he faced.

“I’m developing this mostly because it’s a solution to a problem I have myself. I’m following loads of series that air at separate intervals and you keep having to take the same steps manually: Figure out when something has aired, wait for a download to appear, go to The Pirate Bay, search for a torrent, sort it by most seeds, weed out the crap, and download.”

While he has a Netflix account, SchizoDuckie says most TV-shows take weeks or months to become available in Europe where he’s located.

“We don’t even have the final half of Breaking Bad yet. So then you resort back to piracy,” he says, adding that many other people are probably facing a similar problem.

Right now SeriesGuide is in beta stage, but SchizoDuckie says that many more features will be added in the near future. This will include automatic notifications when new episodes are released, automatic downloads, plus support for seedboxes and remote downloading.

SeriesGuide is free of charge and available in the Chrome Store. It currently comes in two flavors; one that opens the extension in the same tab, and one that launches it in a separate tab.

There’s very little doubt that the TV-companies wont be amused by SeriesGuide. However, SchizoDuckie believes that the extension is perfectly legal and there’s no lawsuit on the horizon.

“I’m not really worried. First off, I’m in Europe, I don’t have to worry about gazillions of dollars of lawyer fees if I cough in the wrong direction. Secondly, I’m not distributing anything illegal, I’m merely connecting pieces of data that are freely available on the web and presenting them in another interface,” he says.

“This is exactly what Google and The Pirate Bay does too, and this is exactly what a human does if he operates this same procedure manually. If there’s a law against that somehow, then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

That said, Google is known to boot torrent related extensions from the Chrome Store over “piracy concerns“, so there is a chance that SeriesGuide will not be available there forever. According to SchizoDuckie, this isn’t really a major problem.

“If somehow the whole thing does get taken down, then the source code is still out there, since it’s an open source project. The genie is out of the bottle,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

China and piracy are topics that often run hand-in-hand and as a result the country is subjected to endless criticism from the world’s largest entertainment companies. Figures of up to 99% piracy on certain products are thrown around like confetti making tackling the Chinese infringement issue a seemingly impossible task. However, it doesn’t have to be that way and things are beginning to change.

At the turn of 2014 and following an investigation into the streaming of unlicensed content, the National Copyright Administration of China labeled the QVOD video platform and Baidu, China’s largest search engine, as 2013′s top copyright infringers. In a parallel lawsuit filed with the help of the MPA, both services were fined $41,000 for copyright infringement, the maximum currently permissible.

Then something interesting happened. Just days later Sohu Video, a local platform with 389 million users, announced it had secured licenses to show NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Other deals to show The Walking Dead and Modern Family to a massive Chinese audience are also in the bag.

And now the BBC is getting in the on act too. Inspired by a Chinese obsession with Sherlock, its hit show based on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the UK national broadcaster is fast-tracking it straight to China and airing it just two hours after it debuts in the UK.

The first episode has already been watched millions of times and every single one of those Chinese viewings subtracts from those who would otherwise have chosen to obtain the show from unlicensed sources.

This move by the BBC might only chip away slightly at the huge piracy rate in China but it’s a great start and one that shows real potential, as recognized by Sohu.com, the video site that recently licensed Saturday Night Live.

“The more content we buy, the less piracy we get,” chief executive Charles Zhang said.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These lists give insight into recent trends, and in 2013 Nelson Mandela, Paul Walker and iPhone 5s were the top trending searches on Google.

But what about torrent search engines? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

There is no central database of searches available, but Kickass.to, one of the top three torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2013 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent networks during the last 12 months.

Topping the lists this year is YIFY, which refers to the popular movie release group. The group has millions of dedicated followers who use the ‘YIFY’ tag to find its recent releases. The movies World War Z and Iron Man 3 complete the top three.

The top 10 contains three other movie title related searches: Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness and Now You See Me. The search term 2013, often used to find recent movies, is listed in sixth place.

Traditionally, TV-shows are much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and it’s no different this year. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Dexter made it into the top 10, followed by The Walking Dead and Suits further down the list.

Adult related searches are surprisingly absent among the popular search terms, and the same is true for music and game searches. The only non-video search in the top 50 is Windows 8 in 40th place.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that ITA, a term used to find Italian content and the most searched for keyword in 2011, dropped out of the top 50 entirely. This can be explained by the fact that KickassTorrent was blocked by all Italian Internet providers last year.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search phrases on Kickass.to (minus site specific searches). This list will be different for each torrent site, but we assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

—

1. yify
2. world war z
3. iron man 3
4. breaking bad
5. man of steel
6. 2013
7. game of thrones
8. Star Trek Into Darkness
9. now you see me
10. dexter
11. pacific rim
12. the lord of the rings appendices
13. despicable me 2
14. this is the end
15. french
16. jack reacher
17. the walking dead
18. oblivion
19. a good day to die hard
20. elysium
22. suits
22. fast and furious 6
23. arrow
24. true blood
25. the conjuring
26. after earth
27. White House Down
28. Django Unchained
29. percy jackson sea of monsters
30. 2 guns
31. gangster squad
32. olympus has fallen
33. under the dome
34. jack the giant slayer
35. warm bodies
36. life of pi
37. pain and gain
38. Hansel and Gretel 2013
39. spartacus
40. windows 8
41. grown ups 2
42. 1080p
43. hindi
44. red 2
45. skyfall
46. the hobbit
47. movie 43
48. argo
49. how i met your mother
50. telugu

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

With 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2013 season finale has beat the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead complete the top three with and estimated 4.2 and 3.6 million downloads respectively.

Game of Thrones’ win comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records already this year, with over 170,000 people sharing a copy of an episode simultaneously.

There are a wide variety of reasons why people download TV-shows, but to a certain degree one could claim that HBO is to blame for the massive piracy of Game of Thrones. The network prefers to keep access to the show “exclusive” and even Netflix wasn’t able to buy the rights no matter what they offered.

Interestingly enough, we also learned this year that the huge number of unauthorized downloads don’t bother the show’s makers all that much, quite the contrary. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca previously admitted that piracy generated much-needed “cultural buzz” around his show.

Jeff Bewkes, CEO of HBO’s parent company Time Warner, went even further, stating that piracy resulted in more subscriptions for his company and that receiving the title of “most-pirated” was “better than an Emmy.”

On the other end of the spectrum we have Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer of The Walking Dead, who told Variety last week that unauthorized downloads are not necessarily the blessing others claim they are.

“There’s a mistaken belief by many of my peers that piracy is somehow good, that viewers will develop a habit to pay for it. I’m not sure they really understand other than anecdotal evidence that their ratings go up that the people who pirate are not then going to choose legal downloads or legal viewing in the future,” Hurd said.

Hurd has a point, as it’s not always that easy for existing pirates to give up their habit, not even if the legal options are widely available and free. For example, The Walking Dead premiere this year was downloaded en masse in the US, despite the fact that AMC streamed the show for free.

This debate about whether TV-show piracy is a good or bad thing will most likely continue throughout the coming year, and beyond.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide ( per single episode) for 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data are estimated by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since there are no public sources to draw data from. The total piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Some hours later Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a public policy research organization based in Dallas, Texas, expressed his displeasure over just about everything connected to the site, from pirates and those who report on them, to the researchers and their findings.

Giovanetti’s problems seem to be two-fold. First, he thinks that reporting on “criminal behavior’ is somehow unacceptable and second, the effects of piracy on the legitimate market should be discounted due to the phenomenon being unlawful. After dismissing any connection between piracy and a lack of legal options as “utterly irrelevant”, Giovanetti proceeded to shoot the messenger.

“It IS interesting that TorrentFreak brazenly publishes a list of the most pirated movies. That’s pretty in-your-face behavior, considering that piracy is illegal,” the IPI president wrote.

Not surprisingly that statement raised our collective eyebrows. Just last month an NBC Universal-commissioned study from NetNames titled ‘Sizing the Piracy Universe’ generated dozens of news articles. By Giovanetti’s standards that report must go way beyond brazen, since the amount of illegal activity documented in the study was on a staggering scale.

Of course, all the major movie studios hire companies to prepare reports on pirates too, it’s just that unlike us “brazen” folk they don’t make that data publicly available every week. But despite Giovanetti’s disapproval, it’s encouraging to know that even the MPAA finds TorrentFreak data useful when it wants to make a point.

A blog post published yesterday by the MPAA’s Kate Bedingfield happily cited our recent (in-your-face) Walking Dead piracy stats, although we had to summon a wry smile when we saw that the MPAA chose to credit Variety as the source and not us. Perhaps there really is no respect for creators these days.

At this point and since we have a convenient MPAA segue, it’s probably appropriate to question why Giovanetti is so interested in movie piracy.

The IPI identifies itself as a “non-profit, non-partisan public policy think tank…founded in 1987 to research, develop and promote innovative and non-partisan solutions to today’s public policy problems.”

While that’s all very nice, according to the MPAA’s latest tax filing the IPI are actually being paid by Hollywood to “promote the film industry.”

With that established, let’s have a look at what Giovanetti has to say about the apparently reprehensible notion that piracy might be a market signal.

“[It] is utterly irrelevant whether or not a pirated movie is available for streaming. That’s because the release schedule and business plan for the movie is entirely the business of whoever owns the movie, and not anyone else. That’s an implication of property rights that libertarians ought to understand. You and your pirate friends do not get to decide what happens to my property,” he said.

It’s worth pointing out that earlier in Giovanetti’s rant he referred to the researchers at George Mason University as the libertarians, so here he deliberately aligns them with those carrying out the illegal downloading, a quite ridiculous notion.

The problem with the latter half of Giovanetti’s assertion, that ‘pirates’ don’t get to decide what happens to ‘his’ property, is plain to see. Of course, sharing content without permission is against copyright law in many countries, so those who feel harmed by the act have a legal right to reply. But that misses the point.

Whether Giovanetti likes it or not, piracy exists and whether people have the right to or not they engage in unauthorized downloading. Stamp your feet and shout about rights all day long, it makes no difference to the reality on the ground. If it did we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

And finally, just when it couldn’t get much worse, Giovanetti again turns on the researchers for suggesting that a modification of Hollywood’s business model might ease the piracy situation.

“They are implying a change that should happen because of criminal behavior. And those of us who are champions of markets do NOT defend criminal behavior as a market force or creative disruption. Markets take place within the rule of law. We don’t insist that markets adapt to account for criminal behavior. Rule of law is also something libertarians should understand,” Giovanetti notes.

Sadly, these statements help no one. If “rule of law” was a suitable deterrent then already unauthorized downloading wouldn’t be an issue – aren’t $150K in statutory damages for a single infringement already enough to send a message? Apparently not.

What this problem needs is creative thinking and a desire to deal with a real-life situation already underway, not people boo-hooing about how wrong it all is while shooting both the messengers and those looking for solutions.

Especially when they aren’t up-front about who they’re doing it for.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In some cases people had to wait up to a year to view their favorite show after the U.S. release, which is unacceptable for most die-hard fans.

Responding to this criticism the TV industry has systematically improved traditional release windows. The recent premiere of The Walking Dead’s fourth season is a prime example of how the industry is adapting to the signals pirates have been sending for years.

To remove one of the incentives for people to grab an unauthorized copy of the show, Fox International Channels premiered the show in 125 countries a day after it first aired on US television.

“We want to prevent the spoilers for sure, we also want to make sure [international viewers] get the best version of the show — not some pirated version,” Liz Dolan, Fox International Channel’s chief marketing officer told The Wrap.

Unfortunately for Fox, however, pirated versions are available in better quality than most legal streaming options. Also, the download numbers have not declined, quite the opposite.

Data gathered by TorrentFreak shows that 16 hours after the first episode appeared online more than half a million people had grabbed a copy through one of many torrent sites. This is more than last year’s season premiere, despite the legal viewing options.

Interestingly, most downloaders come from the U.S. where there is no release lag at all.

Based on a sample of more than 30,000 people who shared the show via a BitTorrent client, we see that the United States is in the lead with 15.5 percent of the total. This means that even though people can stream the episode for free, many still preferred to download it through a torrent site.

In the U.K and Australia there was a slight delay but even legal availability couldn’t prevent people from pirating the season opening. With 11.7 and 10.1 percent these countries are second and third respectively. The Philippines and Canada complete the top five with 8.8 and 6.8 percent of the total.

Fox has to be applauded for making the show available quickly in so many territories, something that was unthinkable half a decade ago. It’s safe to say that the download numbers would have been much higher without these efforts, although at the moment piracy is far from defeated.

In part this might be because some prefer the unauthorized download option simply out of habit. This is especially true for U.S. file-sharers. As we reported earlier this year, many people who pay for a Netflix subscription downloaded Netflix’s exclusive Arrested Development release, preferring the download experience over online streaming.

There is also another group, one that simply doesn’t want to pay for a subscription, which is required in Australia for example. It’s also possible that they are just unhappy with the viewing options currently on offer. In many countries viewers still have to tune in at a fixed time slot while many prefer to program their own viewing schedule.

The challenge for the entertainment industry is to take away these leftover incentives, and make sure that the legal options become the default. For some people it may be too late to be converted, but for most there’s still hope.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The achievement comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records in a few weeks, and the high number of unauthorized downloads has been widely covered in the press.

Even before the third season started there was already a lot of talk about Game of Thrones piracy. Interestingly, many of the people connected to the show saw it as a compliment rather than a major threat that needs to be dealt with.

The most outspoken position was taken by David Petrarca, the show’s director, who noted that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. According to the director, pirates are partly responsible for the “cultural buzz” the show needs to thrive and survive.

After the season got underway some critical notes also appeared. The Ambassador of the United States of America to Australia recently complained about the “plain theft” being carried out by Australians.

This was countered by many self-confessed pirates including Timo Vuorensola, director of the Disney movie Iron Sky. The Finnish director told HBO that their legal service “sucks” and promised to download the show from The Pirate Bay instead.

The end result is that the most shared episode of Game of Thrones, the season opening, was downloaded by 5.2 million people all over the world. This dazzling statistic represents a 25 percent increase compared to last year and three times the amount achieved by several of the TV shows further down the top 10.

The increase in viewers wasn’t limited to the pirated channels though. HBO also saw ratings for Game of Thrones increase by roughly a quarter, driving many new customers to their paid subscriptions.

Whether the number of legal viewers would be higher or lower without piracy is hard to measure, but it could go both ways.

Looking at the full list we see that it contains many household names that have done well over the years, such as The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, which are listed in second and third place respectively.

There are also some notable newcomers. In fact, three shows in the list of most pirated shows just completed their first season – Hannibal, Vikings and Arrow. All three achieved between one and two million downloads per episode.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide (estimates per single episode) for the spring season from March up until June 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since these can’t be measured accurately. The full piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These figures understandably caused much debate, but left show director David Petrarca quite unruffled. During a panel discussion at the University of Western Australia the 47-year-old said that shows like Game of Thrones thrive on “cultural buzz” and benefit from the social commentary they generate. Piracy, he said, helps to oil those wheels.

But Petrarca wasn’t the only show associate with the impression that piracy might have its benefits. Just a couple of weeks later and the show’s actors were weighing in, with Rose Leslie, who plays Ygritte, describing it as a plus.

“I don’t think HBO will be too happy, but yes, one way or another that’s a huge compliment. Not just to me but to the show as a whole,” she said.

With Season 3 of the smash-hit series getting underway last night, HBO have also commented on the piracy situation but in a quite unexpected way. Rather than come out guns blazing they actually agree with Leslie – piracy is indeed a form of flattery.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told EW. “[Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

For HBO to publicly admit that piracy is even a partial positive comes as quite a surprise, but it becomes even more interesting when Lombardo talks about its effect on revenue streams.

Last month Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Jaime Lannister in the show, said that although people watch the show online, he hoped they would still go out and buy the DVD or Blu-ray. And guess what? According to HBO, they do.

“The demand is there,” Lombardo said. “And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales.”

These comments from HBO are significant and underline what many observers have suspected all along. If you have a great product you should expect piracy, but you can also count on large numbers of people to support your efforts financially too. Every viewer – paid or unpaid – is a potential ambassador for the show and therefore a valuable part of the marketing cycle.

It’s too early to say whether Episode 1 of Season 3 will break last year’s download stats but the signs are already there. Last night’s show rocketed straight to the top of The Pirate Bay’s charts for most active torrent, driving way ahead of its nearest competitor, episode 16 of season 3 of The Walking Dead.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These lists give insight into people’s interests over the preceding 12 months. On Google, for example, in 2012 “What is SOPA” was the most asked question typed into Google in both the U.S. and Australia.

But what about BitTorrent? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

Unfortunately there is no central database of searches available, but Kat.ph, one of the top 3 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2012 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent during the last 12 months.

Topping the lists this year is the TV-show The Walking Dead, followed by the more general keywords 2012 and French. The latter two are used to find recent content and French language releases respectively.

The top 10 further contains six movie related searches including Ted, Taken 2, The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. Besides movie titles the top 50 also contains other video related searches such as DVDrip, 720p, 3D and Movies.

Traditionally, TV-shows are much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and it’s no different this year. After The Walking Dead, Homeland is the most popular TV-related search phrase in 12th place, followed by Game of Thrones and Sons of Anarchy further down the list.

Besides movies and TV-shows the list is completed with a few unavoidable adult related searches, and the relatively rare software and game related keywords such as Windows 8, PSP and Android.

Perhaps most surprising of all, music isn’t all that popular on public BitTorrent indexes, as we find no music related terms in the top 50 at all.

Ita, a term used to find Italian content, dropped from first place last year to 31st this year. This is not really surprising as Italian ISPs were ordered to block access to the site in May.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search phrases on Kat.ph. This list will be different on other public BitTorrent sites, but we assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

—

1. the walking dead
2. 2012
3. french
4. ted
5. dexter
6. batman
7. taken 2
8. the dark knight rises
9. the avengers
10. brave
11. skyfall
12. homeland
13. game of thrones
14. 720p
15. the hunger games
16. dvdrip
17. 1080p
18. windows 8
19. prometheus
20. sons of anarchy
21. 3d
22. the amazing spiderman
23. looper
24. arrow
25. revenge
26. yify
27. twilight
28. battleship
29. total recall
30. glee
31. ita
32. movies
33. psp
34. supernatural
35. resident evil
36. x art
37. windows 7
38. magic mike
39. telugu
40. android
41. fringe
42. minecraft
43. once upon a time
44. harry potter
45. madagascar 3
46. wwe
47. breaking bad
48. family guy
49. american horror story
50. 2011

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Over the years the number of TV-show downloads on BitTorrent has leveled off a bit, but this year we saw a small increase again.

The majority of TV-show piracy, more than 80 percent, occurs outside the US and lacking availability is the top reason why people turn to BitTorrent.

For chart leader Game of Thrones this is no different. Airing delays and HBO’s choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons why so many people pirated the show.

Game of Thrones is particularly popular in Australia, where people have to wait a week longer than fans in the U.S. to view the show. Nevertheless, even in the U.S. hundreds and thousands are downloading the show for free, although many would love to pay for it if HBO offered a standalone HBO GO subscription.

In common with many branches of the entertainment industry, the challenge for TV companies such as HBO is to come up with a business model that allows users to consume what they want at any given time, without losing existing revenue in the process.

When that puzzle is solved worldwide the number of unauthorized downloads will be pretty much insignificant.

Below we have compiled a list of the most-downloaded TV-shows (single episode) in 2012, together with the TV audience in the U.S. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.