With 16,580,000 downloads on BitTorrent alone, Avatar is undisputedly the most pirated film of the year.

Never before have we seen this many downloads of a movie in a single year. This honor previously belonged to last year’s winner Star Trek with 10,960,000 downloads, but Avatar quashed this previous record.

Earlier this year we already crowned Avatar as the most downloaded Blu-ray film ever, with 200,000 downloads in just 4 days. In the months that followed the number of Blu-ray downloads of Avatar have exceeded two million.

Another expected entry in the list of most pirated movies in 2010 is The Hurt Locker. This film was already available on BitTorrent for most of 2009, but really started to gain attention from the public after it won six Oscars.

This huge success online compared to the meager box-office earnings was most likely one of the reasons why the makers of the film sued thousands of alleged BitTorrent users last spring. Despite the looming threat of legal action the downloads continued pretty much undeterred, resulting in a 9th place in todays list.

As every year there are also a few notable absentees, such as the two best grossing movies at the box-office this year, Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand, Kick-Ass and Green Zone were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterwards, the data is carefully checked and corrected.

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

Just before the official US release, that became possible. There appears to be several releases of the movie online, although some appear to originate from the same TS (Telesync) copy, although without downloading and watching them all, that is very hard to verify from the screenshots currently available.

Normally an Internet leak of a movie, particularly one the size of Avatar, leads to furious statements from the studios. Indeed, when a movie is leaked before it hits US theaters, as was the case with productions such as Star Wars Episode III, Wolverine and now Avatar, the FBI usually gets called in. This time things seem a little different.

This weekend a press release began to circulate which quotes Eden Wright, a Fox representative, saying that due to the movie’s availability in 3D at the cinema, “piracy will play a much smaller role in stealing profits from [Avatar] due to the technological hurdles it imposes.”

It’s difficult to disagree with Wright. James Cameron has gone to extraordinary lengths to produce this 3D movie and seeing a blurred copy acquired from the Internet will just ruin the whole experience – people who are prepared to pay will want to see it properly.

Indeed, the figures seem supportive. Avatar pulled in more than $3.5 at its midnight launch with 3D viewings accounting for 85% of the gross. On Friday it took $27 million, with 3D accounting for 58% of the gross.

However, there are always those that either don’t have the money or easily succumb to the temptation. These people have been feverishly hitting BitTorrent and according to data collected by TorrentFreak, thus far Avatar has clocked up around 500,000 downloads in just two days.

The press release mentioned earlier also put a lesser-known blog firmly in the spotlight. “James Cameron’s Avatar first appeared on a blog GetTheNew.com,” it read, going on to say that such sites “…now account for as much as 20% of online piracy.”

While the release states that the site is a source of information, those unfamiliar with how Internet piracy works could be forgiven for thinking that somehow GetTheNew was responsible for the leak, but that’s not true.

GetTheNew, which opened just this September, told TorrentFreak that while they may have been the first site to publish the name of the pirate release (which incidentally leaked to P2P first, an increasing phenomenon), any Google searches the site provided would have come up blank since the movie had not hit public torrent sites yet. All GetTheNew had published at the time was a review of the movie and links to the relevant pages on IMDB.

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

Set on a moon under siege by humans determined to exploit its resources, this science fiction epic has been in the planning for many years and was even delayed as Cameron waited until the technology became available to realize his dream.

When the movie goes on full release this week the wait will finally be over, but some lucky individuals have already been enjoying advance previews. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of some who hoped to witness the 3D version of the movie in Germany yesterday, as instead of technology enabling a jaw-dropping extra-dimensional experience, it brought the whole thing to a standstill.

According to a report, 3D digital versions of the movie were delivered to certain cinemas but a problem with their encryption meant that they could not be watched at all the theaters.

The complex DRM system, which involves several certificates and server-delivered time-sensitive keys for hard drives and projectors, failed in a way consistent with the movie’s epic status. Unfortunately, after working for several hours cinema workers failed to decrypt 150 gigabytes of data, which resulted in at least one location reverting back to the 2D version.

DRM strikes again, this time in 3D.

“We regret the failures and the associated discomfort, but we are confident that we will be able to play the premiere both in 2D and in 3D,” Oliver Fock, general manager of CineStar group said in a comment to the fiasco. And indeed, according to the latest reports the problems have been fixed just in time for the public premiere.

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