That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.

"Research for the government has shown that film piracy costs the industry about half a billion pounds a year," he said.

But it's not just illegal film downloading that's on the rise - research suggests people are illegally downloading more TV shows too.

Prince claims he is sitting atop a treasure trove of unreleased songs and has no intention of offering them to the public while Web piracy goes unchecked.

"Nobody's making money now except phone companies, Apple and Google...It's like the gold rush out there. Or a carjacking. There's no boundaries."

Every time Prince opens his mouth about the Web he reinforces the stereotype of a spoiled, out-of-touch pop star. For instance, in the Guardian interview he said that analog music is superior to digital because "it affects a different place in your brain" and that when you play back digital songs "you can't feel anything."

The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked.

Actually, hacked is probably too strong a word, since it appears TMG left the front door open.

"A virtual machine leaked a lot of information like scripts, p2p clients to generate fake peers, local physical addresses in the datacenter and even a password that could lead to a major global TMG security breach," French security researcher Olivier Laurelli, aka Bluetouff, just informed TorrentFreak.

"These services adopt a security-through-obscurity mechanism where a user can access the uploaded files only by knowing the correct download URIs," the researchers wrote in a paper presented at the most recent USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats.

They also used the sites to store private files that contained internet beacons, so they'd know if anyone opened them. Over a month's span, 80 unique IP addresses accessed the so-called honey files 275 times.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau is hoping to lay a little guilt on movie downloaders by dramatizing the stark human toll BitTorrent inflicts on Hollywood boom mic operators... or something.

The public service address shows a peddler on a New York street giving away free movies he said were downloaded from the internet. Beside him stands a soon-to-be unemployed worker. "What's more important," he asks, "the movie or this human being?"

MPAA vice president Michael O'Leary made the battle against movie pirates sound downright patriotic.

"The key foundation of American industry, the expectation that hard work and innovation is rewarded, is imperiled when thieves, whether online or on the street, are allowed to steal America's creative products and enrich themselves along the way.".

Some note the recent strategy of pressuring payment methods to cut off funding from websites they accuse of duping consumers into paying for pirated content as a more recent change in strategy in the organizations strategy to fight piracy.

"Megaupload is a legitimate business operating within the boundaries of the law. In five years of operation we have not been sued by a single content owner. If the RIAA or MPAA would have legal grounds they would have taken us to court by now."

This bit of data comes courtesy of a new report released by UK recording industry group BPI, which says that the music industry is growing slower than it should thanks to the lack of action against downloaders.

The group says that the industry's growth is being hurt because of the lack of consequences for those illegally downloading music files.

In the court documents the RIAA filed with the court, which were heavily redacted, the group claimed that someone launched the site Metapirate.com and started providing users with "several links to download the LimeWire Pirate Edition."

The RIAA has requested that Lime Wire assist with an investigation into the identity of the person calling himself or herself "Meta Pirate."

"We have very recently become aware of unauthorized applications on the Internet purporting to use the LimeWire name," says the company. "We demand that all persons using the LimeWire software, name, or trademark in order to upload or download copyrighted works in any manner cease and desist from doing so.

We checked in with "MetaPirate," the hacker behind LimeWire: Pirate Edition. He has no plans to change what he's doing.

"Given the legal pressure that LimeWire is under," he said by e-mail, "it's understandable that they would urge us to stop distributing LimeWire Pirate Edition - but under the terms of the GPL, we have the right to continue doing so. LimeWire Pirate Edition is free software in the most irksome sense of the word."