File sharing still on the up

Hollywood appears to be losing its long-running battle with copyright offenders, according to a report from an influential market watcher.

Internet piracy analyst Viant said yesterday that it reckoned between 400,000 and 600,000 movie copies are downloaded from the web each day, an increase of 20 per cent from last year.

Despite action by industry bodies against sites such as music file swap-shop Napster - which has been out of action since last July - web surfers are going to other locations to obtain film material such as bootleg versions of movie blockbusters Spiderman and Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones before they come out.

A peak of nine million file-swappers online at one time was recorded this month, Viant said.

But the analyst organisation estimated that only two or three million of the ten million web surfers seeking copies of the movies actually obtained them.