So instead we decided to go for the articles that our readers found interesting enough to discuss in volume; the most commented articles of 2010.

Below are the 25 most discussed articles of the year. It’s been an exciting ride, with many ups and downs, and we’d like to thank everyone who read and contributed for your support. Do you have a favorite that didn’t make the list? Feel free, as always, to comment below.

Happy New Year… We’ll report for duty in the morning.

1. U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More (November)

2. U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs (July)

3. OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free (January)

4. ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails (September)

5. The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure (May)

6. Digital Economy Bill Passes, File-Sharing Ends Soon (June)

7. Leaked Emails Reveal Profits of Anti-Piracy Cash Scheme (September)

8. BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures (November)

9. Senate Committee Passes Bill To Quash Pirate Websites (November)

10. ‘Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple’ US Vice President Says (June)

11. The Pirate Bay Appeal Verdict: Guilty Again (November)

12. 4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites (September)

13. The Mysterious And Scary BitTorrent Monitoring Site (April)

14. LimeWire Shuts Down After Losing Court Battle With The RIAA (October)

15. 4chan to DDoS RIAA Next – Is This the Protest of the Future? (September)

16. LimeWire Resurrected By Secret Dev Team (November)

17. The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host (May)

18. World’s First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden (July)

19. Police in File-Sharing Raids Across Europe, WikiLeaks Host Targeted (September)

20. IP-Addresses of First Hurt Locker Victims Revealed (June)

21. Mulve – The Nightmare-Scenario Music Downloading Tool (September)

22. Demonoid Faces Major Downtime Once Again (April))

23. Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Copyright Infringers (March)

24. US Lawmakers Want to Quash Pirate Websites (September)

25. RIAA Wins Big Against File-Sharer, $1.5M for 24 Songs (November)

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

Lost and Heroes, two shows that were also leading the list in 2009, have achieved slightly fewer downloads when compared to last year. Despite this slight dip, the most downloaded episode of Heroes is still exceeding the average viewership on US television. The same is true for Dexter which moved up to third place this year.

The massive piracy of TV-shows is mostly a reflection of the unavailability of these shows in countries outside the U.S., and a signal that TV viewing habits are changing. There is a huge interest in on-demand TV and there are millions of viewers that can potentially bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

The percentage of TV-downloaders from the U.S. has steadily declined over the last years, in part thanks to alternative viewing options such as Hulu. In other regions, such as Australia and Europe, the demand for U.S. TV-shows remains at pretty much the same level as last year.

Outside the U.S. fans sometimes have to wait for weeks or even months before the show airs on TV in their own country. Many of them are simply not that patient or willing to torture themselves, and turn to BitTorrent in desperation.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows, together with the viewer average for TV in the U.S. based on data from Nielsen. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

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

Therefore, it would come as no surprise if the game repeated this success on BitTorrent. And indeed, Black Ops takes the honor of most pirated game on the PC this year, a title which went to Modern Warfare in 2009. Even though it has only been available for a few weeks, the game beat Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by a wide margin with 4,270,000 downloads in total.

Despite this ‘success’, Black Ops does not lead the Xbox 360 and Wii lists.

As expected, Mario and Donkey Kong are in high demand on the Wii with a 1st and 3rd place respectively. Wii Party is listed in second place with well over a million downloads, while Black Ops fell a few thousand downloads short to make it into the top 5.

On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Dante’s Inferno. This game was released in February and amassed a total of 1,280,000 downloads, beating Black Ops which ended up in 5th place with 930,000 downloads. The latter, however, did make the headlines several times due to an early leak.

Weeks before the official release of Black Ops, reports came in that the Xbox 360 version had already leaked to BitTorrent. Although not all “leaks” turned out to be legit, a copy of the game did eventually come out a week before it hit the stores. This, despite efforts from Treyarch’s community manager Josh Olin to stop it.

As can be seen from the three lists below, PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category grew a little compared to last year.

The data for these lists is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

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

BitTorrent site Mininova also got a questionable mention in Google’s Zeitgeit list as one of the fastest falling searches in 2010, which follows the collapse of the site earlier this year. In 2006 things were going much better for the site as Mininova was one of the most searched for terms on Google.

Following this Zeitgeist trend we thought it might be a good idea to make a similar list for searches on BitTorrent indexes. Since BitTorrent searches are scattered across hundreds of sites it is impossible to get a full picture of what people search for on BitTorrent, but luckily one of the largest indexers agreed to cooperate.

KickassTorrents, one of the top 10 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2010 with us. With a few hundred million searches a year this data should give a clear indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent in the last 12 months.

At the top of the list we find “Inception“, the movie that also appeared in our most pirated movies chart of the year. In addition, four other titles made it into the top 10; “Iron Man 2″, “Avatar”, “Despicable Me”, and “Clash of the Titans”. Movie related searches are clearly the most popular among users of the site.

Aside from movie titles we find “2010” in third place and “dvdrip” in seventh, two keywords that are also used to find movie related content. Another interesting keyword is “French” which shows that France’s anti-piracy law that went into effect earlier this year isn’t chasing many people away from BitTorrent. The top 10 is completed by the inevitable adult searches “xxx” and “porn“.

The first TV related search is “Dexter” which appears further down the list in 15th place. “Windows 7” is the first software related search keyword in 20th place, and for the first music related entry we have to go all the way down to “Eminem” which is listed as number 47.

A rather surprising entry in the top 100 is “axxo” in 17th place, since the last torrent file by the popular DVDripper was uploaded in March 2009. Axxo has been among the most popular search keywords on BitTorrent for years and it seems that old habits are hard to break.

Below is the full list of the 100 most entered search phrases on KickassTorrents. This list will be different on other BitTorrent sites, but we have to assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans
11. toy story 3
12. glee
13. salt
14. twilight eclipse
15. dexter
16. the sorcerer's apprentice
17. axxo
18. robin hood
19. prince of persia
20. windows 7
21. get him to the greek
22. predators 2010
23. the last airbender
24. shutter island
25. knight and day
26. the expendables
27. takers
28. dinner for schmucks
29. unstoppable
30. the book of eli
31. grown ups
32. true blood
33. alice in wonderland
34. movies
35. shrek forever after
36. supernatural
37. hindi
38. house
39. devil
40. step up 3d
41. megamind
42. harry potter and the deathly hallows
43. skyline
44. green zone
45. naughty america
46. iron man 2
47. eminem
48. predators
49. lost
50. the town
51. date night
52. the wolfman
53. smallville
54. the last song
55. torrents
56. how to train your dragon
57. fringe
58. dear john
59. toy story 3
60. red
61. the social network
62. weeds
63. noir
64. telugu
65. pc games
66. vampire diaries
67. the town
68. 2012
69. twilight
70. cop out
71. tamil
72. sex and the city 2
73. harry potter and the deathly hallows part 1
74. remember me
75. the walking dead
76. eclipse
77. due date
78. book of eli
79. fxg
80. true blood
81. avatar the last airbender
82. grown ups
83. ironman 2
84. entourage
85. sherlock holmes
86. how i met your mother
87. sex
88. microsoft office 2010
89. spartacus
90. the pacific
91. karate kid
92. the other guys
93. call of duty black ops
94. despicable me
95. chuck
96. ita
97. resident evil
98. wii
99.. due date
100. hot tub time machine

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