This week there are three newcomers in the top 10. Green Zone is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

The BitTorrent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. The two largest BitTorrent trackers today didn’t exist a year ago, and the top tracker of last year has shut down. The upside is that all these changes went by relatively unnoticed to the millions of downloaders.

Despite claims that millions of BitTorrent downloads would cease to work if a major BitTorrent tracker closed down, most downloaders today don’t even notice when a tracker stops working. Thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX central trackers have become a luxury good to some degree.

Indeed, larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

It’s therefore good to know that several new players took the place of The Pirate Bay’s tracker when it shut down last year. Below we show a list of the five largest public BitTorrent trackers based on the number of torrents and peers (downloaders+uploaders) they track.

The first thing that stands out in the top five above is that the first three spots are taken by standalone trackers that do not have a torrent index or search engine attached to them. These three trackers are responsible for the coordination of millions of public downloads on BitTorrent but do not provide any torrents on their sites like The Pirate Bay used to do.

PublicBitTorrent and OpenBitTorrent, number one and two in the list, are both relatively new trackers that emerged after The Pirate Bay announced that it would sell the site last year. This sale eventually failed to go through, but The Pirate Bay did close its tracker so both trackers became a very welcome addition to the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Another observation is that there is a lot of weight on the shoulders of the top three trackers. Although there are close to 50,000 known BitTorrent trackers, only a fraction of these are active, and of these only a few dozen track more than 1,000 torrent files. Without the five trackers in the list above most of the smaller public torrents could quickly become unavailable.

Although trackers in the top five are all public ones, there are a few private ones that should be in this list if it was only based on the number of torrents tracked. The music tracker What.cd, for example, currently tracks more than 800,000 torrents alone. A dazzling number that puts the site in fourth place based on the number of torrents, not peers.

For BitTorrent’s long tail content reliable public trackers are still invaluable. The good news is that the ecosystem is better off than a year ago when The Pirate Bay was carrying this burden alone, but it’s far from bulletproof yet.

Source TorrentFreak.com

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. She’s Out of My League is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week there are five newcomers in the top 10. Kick-Ass is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week. Iron Man 1 and 2 are both listed in the top 10, which is quite unique.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week there are two newcomers in the top 10. Clash Of The Titans is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week, again.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week there are three newcomers in the top 10 including Avatar which returned after the release of the DVD rip. The Bounty Hunter is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

ICCP Foundation claims to be an international company operating out of Switzerland. They say they are “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright” while assisting their partners to fight “copyright theft around the world”.

In fact what they really do is operate a scam to extort money from BitTorrent users.

Right at this moment we are unsure of the exact route of infection, but somehow malware (probably in either fake file or attached virus form) is displaying a “copyright violation alert” on the victim’s screen, locking it, and redirecting users to the ICPP site where they are told they have been caught infringing copyright.

There they are warned their offenses could result in 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and are given the option to take the (fake) case to court. They are also offered a chance to make the whole thing go away for the payment of a ‘fine’ of around $400. Victims are also prompted to give their name, address and full credit card details – it is unclear how this information is further abused but it doesn’t look good.

If they select the court option, they are scared with this screen:

So that that this evil software (believed to be located at C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\IQManager\iqmanager.exe) more accurately targets BitTorrent users rather than just random users, it appears to scan the user’s hard drive for .torrent files and displays these as ‘evidence’ of an earlier infringement.

In order to boost their credibility, icpp-online.com claim to be affiliated with influential partners – the RIAA, MPAA, and The Copyright Alliance. Of course, this is a complete fabrication.

This whole approach seems very similar to that employed by so-called ‘rogue software‘ or ’scareware’ which attempt to frighten users into parting with cash for often useless software. And it seems the links to malware don’t stop there.

A WHOIS on the ICPP-Online domain reveals some contact data which shows up elsewhere in connection to other questionable activities.

Details on this new threat are scarce at the moment, so if any readers can discover more about this malware or the operation behind it, please collate the information and send it over to tips@torrentfreak.com.

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. From Paris With Love is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week there are four newcomers in the top 10. Legion is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent and Sherlock Holmes dropped out of the top three.

The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Avatar has been an enormous success. The film has broken nearly all records at the box-office, and together with The Hurt Locker it was last night’s big winner raking in nine Academy Award nominations.

James Cameron and the rest of the Avatar crew probably cracked open a few bottles of Champagne to celebrate, but today they will wake up with a serious hangover.

Only a few days after the nominations were announced, a DVD screener of Avatar (2D) appeared online. Before today, only a lower quality Telesync copy of the film has been available on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks.

Ironically, the DVD screener that is now widely available online most likely leaked through one of the Academy Awards voters.

There is no doubt that Avatar will also score big in the list of most downloaded movies this year. The Telesync copy of the film that has been available for over a month was already downloaded by more than two million people.

It is expected that the DVD leak will easily double or even triple these figures. Avatar has been among the most searched for keywords on nearly every torrent site for more than a month already.

Twentieth Century Fox has been extra careful with sending out the DVD-screener of Avatar, as more Academy members received it mid January, just a few days before they had to vote. Although this did delay the leak, it couldn’t be prevented.

How and if the DVD-screener will affect the box-office revenues is up for debate. The film has already grossed more than $2 billion worldwide, which is an absolute record despite the relatively high piracy rate. In fact, high piracy numbers are often an indicator of success at the box-office and vice versa.