Unsurprisingly, it began to appear on BitTorrent sites just a few hours ago, well over a week in advance.

In just 10 hours the album has already been downloaded 100,000 times, which is notable for a music album. A few month ago, some of the fans already got a preview of four of the tracks, after a fan recorded them outside Bono’s villa in the south of France.

Unlike those early leaks, the quality full album that leaked today is reportedly of a quality worth listening to. The source of the leak is unknown, but it has to come from someone close to the band as there were no preview copies sent out to the press.

U2 has always taken an anti-piracy stance and wont be pleased to hear that the album is out before schedule. U2 manager Paul McGuiness has been particularly aggressive in his stance against file-sharers and has suggested that people who share copyrighted files should have their connection to the Internet severed. Skip to 2009 and the RIAA and IFPI are indeed pushing for such legislation.

It doesn’t stop there either. In order to prevent their latest album from being pirated, they refused to send out review copies to the press. Instead they organized listening parties where journalists could listen to the album in advance.

These ‘parties’ were of course surrounded by all kinds of security measures – recording devices and even mobile phones were not allowed anywhere near the hearings. Some good that did.

Despite all the effort the album leaked early, and many U2 fans are having a party of their own now. Over 100,000 of them – and counting.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Proving that if media can be seen, heard or touched it can be copied, songs from U2’s forthcoming album have been leaked online. Four tracks from the album, provisionally entitled ‘No Line On The Horizon’, have appeared on the Internet. The mechanism of the release is pretty comical – Bono blasted the tracks from a stereo in his villa in the South of France so loudly, that a passer-by recognized his voice and recorded them.

Four songs have been put online including the title track, the first single from the album ‘Sexy Boots’, ‘Moment of Surrender’ and ‘For Your Love’.

There’s no doubt that these cam-quality recordings will be particularly poor, but a large section of the file-sharing U2 fans won’t care about that. They have something that they’re not supposed to have and Mr McGuiness has had a bit of egg rubbed in his face – which probably holds more value to file-sharers than a pre-release FLAC rip of the entire album….

…which will appear online too of course, probably before the scheduled November release date.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.