Despite the prophecy that piracy will stop development of movies, music and games, that never to come to pass either. Good products sell and in great numbers too – the massively successful Halo series from Microsoft is a testament to that, despite the piracy.

Late last week, and just about three weeks in advance of its official street date, Halo 4 leaked online and thousands of people downloaded the game. That’s nothing new – all previous games in the series appeared online too.

“We have seen the reports of Halo 4 content being propped around the web and are working closely with our security teams and law enforcement to address the situation,” said Microsoft spokesperson Joe DiMiero.

By the weekend it became clear what Microsoft’s response would be – an Xbox Live ban for those that foolishly connected their Xboxes to the Internet.

Anyone who has gone to the time, trouble and expense of modifying an Xbox, and then downloading a 16GB file should know all too well the risks involved and frankly it’s difficult to have any sympathy with them whatsoever. Piracy is a cat and mouse game and this time the mice got caught. It happens.

But worse still, in the last few days some pirates completely overstepped the mark, not by doing what they always do, but by attempting to ruin the game for everyone else. For the developers of Halo 4 and game lovers everywhere, that is completely unacceptable.

“There are people putting the whole thing on YouTube,” Frank O’Connor, Halo franchise director, told Polygon. “Microsoft is addressing that a single case at a time, it just takes a little while to handle.”

So OK, you’re saying, people just have to stay away from Halo 4 videos on YouTube and nothing will get spoiled. Well it’s not as easy that.

Some people who have pirated the game have been deliberately posting key-point spoilers wherever they can, from Xbox.com’s own forums and game discussion sites everywhere to social networks including Twitter and Facebook. It’s got to such a point that IGN have created a guide to help gamers avoid having Halo 4′s plot ruined by people who just want to mindlessly sabotage the enjoyment of others.

The vast majority of game buyers, game pirates, and the gray area dwellers who buy some and pirate some, detest this kind of behavior. Piracy won’t stop Microsoft making big money on Halo 4, that’s guaranteed, but now potential buyers can’t safely follow the online hype and discussions leading up to Halo 4′s release for fear that some clown will spoil the game.

You can’t easily put a price on beautiful story telling. Sadly, sabotaging that comes for free.

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

In five days the game’s worldwide sales climbed to $550 million, crushing previous record holders Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (only $394m) and The Dark Knight (just $203.8m).

“In just five days of sell through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the largest entertainment launch in history and a pop culture phenomenon,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said commenting on the game’s success. This is, of course, reflected in the number of pirated copies being traded on BitTorrent.

With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s ‘winner‘ Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

The overall trend across all platforms is that, unlike last year, all of the games are 2009 releases. What makes Modern Warfare 2′s chart-topping even more impressive is that this has been achieved after just two months of availability. We further see that the figures for the most downloaded titles have more than doubled compared to last year, equaling the growth in uTorrent users.

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. As expected, Mario titles are in high demand on the Wii.

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.