The report, from broadband measurement firm Sandvine, shows a sharp decrease in the bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent traffic, some of which is associated with the downloading of illegal music and movies.

Torrent-based peer-to-peer file sharing is on the decrease, partly because people are turning to other ways to swap material.

The use of "dark nets" such as Tor and encrypted digital lockers is growing in popularity.

One year ago Japan introduced a tough new law that was warmly welcomed by the music industry. From October 1 2012, those downloading copyrighted material without permission faced a potential two year jail sentence. But while users of Japan’s favorite P2P networks plummeted, sales have not been positively affected. Total music sales this year so far are down 7% on the same period last year, but digital sales are even worse – down 24% since the law was introduced.

“The new law has been effective in increasing the amount of CD rentals, but seems unconnected to the number of people who are actually buying music,” RIAJ chief Kenji Takasugi told NHK.

Following a US court decision BitTorrent search engine isoHunt was ordered to implement a site-wide keyword filter provided by the MPAA. At the time, isoHunt’s founder voiced concerns that this would lead to overfiltering, and it appears that he is right. Aside from Hollywood blockbusters, the broad filter also censors thousands of Creative Commons and public domain files.

As with most filtering systems, it is hard for the public to evaluate its performance when the list itself is secret. Perhaps it’s an idea to open up both the filtering source code as well as the list of banned keywords so the public can help spot abuse?

Just 2% of UK internet users accounted for almost three-quarters of online piracy over a year, the report Ofcom indicated.

It also said pirates spent more on legal downloading and streaming than those who never access illegal content.

The company processed 21,475 responses to four surveys over the year to research the report.

It doesn't stop infringement, because the DRM is always cracked, and the crack always leads to a clean version. And once you have a clean version, it's available everywhere. Those who want to infringe will do so.

"As it is, we've seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year."

In anticipation of having their Swedish domain name seized, this week the crew of The Pirate Bay took evasive action. In the early hours of Tuesday morning they switched to two Greenland-based domains, but already the plan is starting to unravel. The telecoms company in charge of the .GL TLD says it will now block the domains after deciding they will be used illegally.

“Tele-Post has today decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” the company said in a statement received by TorrentFreak.

Today the Pirates announced that they have received a letter from the Swedish “Rights Alliance,” who are threatening legal action against the party and its representatives if they don’t stop servicing TPB within a week.

“Unfortunately, the fact that an activity is legal is not a guarantee that you will get a fair trial. This is precisely why the Pirate Party and is needed more than ever,” Troberg concludes.

TorrentFreak has received reports from people whose perfectly legal files were locked in their Mega accounts for alleged copyright violations. In all cases this happened after these users published links to the files elsewhere on the Internet.

The censored content includes copyrighted music and movies, but also free to share software such as Ubuntu and copies of Kim Dotcom’s very own music.

To test how quickly a file is removed by Mega we decided to post some previously uploaded legal content to Mega-search.me ourselves.

Quite shockingly, the files were pulled down by Mega in a matter of minutes, claiming they had received copyright infringement notices for each of them.

StopFileLockers.com is an anti-piracy group that attempts to take down file-hosting services by attacking their finances.

Mega isn't the only file locker currently in the SFL crosshairs either—Hotfile saw its relationship with PayPal end this week after a lengthy campaign from SFL.

"Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE." And indeed, as of this writing the site was difficult to access at times, perhaps because of heavy traffic.

DotCom's earlier cyber storage locker, MegaUpload, was launched in 2005, only to be shuttered by U.S. federal agencies, which argued that it was a service pirates were using to facilitate copyright infringement.

"You have companies like Dropbox and Google with Drive with materially similar technologies," Rothken said. "and they are in business and they're thriving -- and Mega adds encryption."