But the sheer volume it pretty staggering – in fact, it broke records.

TorrentFreak has the numbers: In just a few hours after the first torrent of the show was uploaded, 163,088 people were sharing the single torrent. That broke down to 110,303 actively sharing and 52,786 still downloading.

That’s a record in the world of BitTorrent tracking – the largest previous swarm belonging to a season premiere of Heroes with 144,663 peers.

If you take into account all of the torrents, TorrentFreak reports that estimates put the total number of Game of Thrones season 3 premiere downloads at over a million. That’s a performance that even a hard-to-satisfy Lannister patriarch can be proud of.

If you break down the numbers, the majority of sharers came from the United States (12.9%), barely topping the U.K., who took 11.5% of the pie. Australia came in third with 9,9% of the total downloaders.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons that so many people decided to torrent the show. It has a huge following, first and foremost. HBO’s international release delays don’t help either. Plus, there’s a large contingent in the U.S. (and elsewhere) that simply don’t subscribe to HBO and can’t get HBO GO because they don’t have cable. Many of these people would pay for a standalone HBO streaming service, but HBO is yet to offer that outside a few Scandinavian countries (although the prospects have gotten a bit better as of late).

But according to one HBO exec, this piracy is more of a compliment and less of a problem.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” HBO programming head Michael Lombardo recently told EW. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.”

A new study from the Dutch Institution for Information Law and CentERdata reveals some startling statistics that completely destroys any notion that pirates only steal. In fact, pirates buy more content than their non-pirate peers.

The study broke down the difference between pirates and non-pirates into four categories – music, films/TV, games and books. In digital media, pirates bought way more content than their non-pirate peers. The study found that pirates are actually three times more likely to buy or stream films and four times more likely to buy digital music. Digital game purchases see the biggest difference with pirates being five times more likely to legitimately purchase games.

As for physical media, it’s still the same. The only difference is that the difference is less pronounced, especially in books. The amount of pirates and non-pirates who legitimately buy books is about the same. The same is true for music and film. Once again, games are the biggest difference with pirates buying way more physical copies of games than their non-pirate peers.

So what does it all mean? The author of the study, Joost Poort, told TorrentFreak that pirates “tend to be more heavy entertainment consumers.” These people will do anything they can to get ahold of content. In a lot of cases, especially in European countries, that means obtaining them through illegal means. It’s an unfortunate reality that entertainment companies are painfully slow in bringing their content to foreign markets.

It should also be noted that many pirates, especially those who illegally download games, have a “try before you buy” attitude. They don’t want to drop that money on a product until they can be sure of the quality of the product. The entertainment industry makes it very hard to ascertain the quality of their products without buying it. Piracy affords them that quick look before making a decision.

Either way, the researchers say that the entertainment industry should back off of file-sharers, pirates and all other groups that they constantly attempt to vilify. These groups are their biggest customers and criminalizing them will only drive away most of their profit. The RIAA already saw that their heavy handed lawsuit tactics from a few years ago actually hurt their bottom line as less people bought from them.

This study comes just as ISPs are beginning to implement a six-strike warning system that will alert alleged pirates that their activities are being monitored. The plan was formulated by the copyright and entertainment lobbies to stop piracy. From the looks of it, their plans have only encouraged more piracy as people begin to move towards anonymous file-sharing via VPNs.

Well, the folks from The Pirate Bay are here to set the record straight. They were not raided by the police, nor were they shut down.

The Pirate Bay46 minutes ago

Dear internet. We have not been raided. We are not shutting down. We like turtles, waffles and you. Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight. It’s ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once. We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. <3 Powered by socialditto  1,000+ likes ·  252 comments

So what’s the problem? According to TorrentFreak, and a subsequent post on the site’s Facebook wall, it’s just a simple power outage. For now, there’s nothing to worry about.

What about The Pirate Bay’s former host being raided? According to TorrentFreak, police raided Swedish hosting company PRQ today. They were reportedly trying to find servers containing copyrighted material. The hosting company may have been targeted because it was founded by two of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, and used to house the servers used by The Pirate Bay in 2006. Several torrent sites that were hosted on PRQ’s servers have been taken offline as a result of the police raid.

Long story short, The Pirate Bay is doing just fine. The site is not hosted at PRQ, and a power outage is to blame for the current downtime. It’s a little strange that the downtime coincided with the police raid, but stranger things have happened.

TorrentFreak reports that a source close to the CCI that the six-strike system is up and ready. The only thing standing in its way is a reluctance on the part of ISPs to start warning subscribers. The fist one out of the gate will be seen as betraying the privacy of their subscribers, and they could start to lose said subscribers.

Regardless, the CCI is pushing for a launch by the end of this year. The current plan is to simultaneously launch the effort across the five largest ISPs in America – Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision. These ISPs will begin testing the warning system in November.

TorrentFreak also reports that the CCI has contracted MarkMonitor to find the identity of alleged pirates. They point out that MarkMonitor is owned by the same company that currently identifies pirates under Ireland’s ridiculous three-strikes system.

The concern right now is that the CCI is being rather secretive about the six-strike system. All we know is that ISPs will punish repeat offenders, but it was never made clear what the punishments would entail. ISPs claimed that they would not terminate a user’s service, but there was never any guarantee made.

In slightly good news, TorrentFreak’s source reports that MarkMonitor had its evidence technique reviewed by an independent third party. The report will apparently be released in the next few weeks to provide transparency on their methods. At that time, we’ll hopefully be able to fully understand what exactly is going into this new method of pirate surveillance.

For now, we can at least rest easy that the six-strike system is nowhere near as bad as Mediacom’s self-instituted three-strike system. The ISP recently said that they would ban a subscriber for life if they were found to be downloading copyrighted content three times in a row.

Regardless of the system, any kind of elevated response system just shows that the copyright lobby still doesn’t understand the proper methods of combatting piracy. Services like Netflix and Spotify have done more to reduce piracy than harebrained schemes implemented by dinosaurs. Of course, we wouldn’t expect them to make things easy on consumers.

What’s funny is that people can still find content from torrent sites as long as they search for relevant terms. It’s true that typing in “The Avengers download” no longer returns links to The Pirate Bay or other torrent sites. Typing in “The Avengers torrent” brings them all back to the front page.

The Pirate Bay addressed Google lowering their search rankings in a blog post. They say that a “very low amount” of their traffic actually comes from Google and that’s only a good thing. They see themselves as a search engine and Google’s move was a way to get rid of the competition. They expect people to search for content directly on The Pirate Bay when nothing shows up on Google.

They do, however, have one concern about Google’s new policy:

The thing we don’t like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They’re dictating terms. It’s really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so….

isoHunt’s Gary Fung takes it a bit further and says that Google’s new ranking signal is an antitrust violation. He points out that YouTube is not on Google’s list of DMCA takedown notices. Google will say that’s because they have their own internal reporting system within YouTube, but isoHunt says it’s all protecting Google’s own interests in search. He reiterates the idea from The Pirate Bay that isoHunt is a search engine that’s competing with Google.

Fung is also concerned over the use of “valid” DMCA takedown notices. He says that Google processes a DMCA takedown notice as valid if it hasn’t been countered. isoHunt receives too many DMCA takedown notices a day for them to counter and so they get counted as signals for Google to downgrade their ranking.

The harm here according to Fung is that a lot of legitimate content on isoHunt gets flagged with DMCA notices by overzealous copyright trolls. The mountains of legitimate content on torrent sites will be removed from Google search results. He equates it to censorship. In response, he says that “we need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust.”

Google has definitely ruffled some feathers with their newest search ranking signal, but it was to be expected sooner or later. The company must now ensure that legitimate content is not downgraded. They must also make search fair for everybody including themselves. Making YouTube and other Google services immune to their own algorithm may raise some antitrust flags in the future.

[h/t: TorrentFreak]

Over at the BitTorrent blog, the team discusses the launch of BitTorrent Torque, which is related to the lead image in name only. Although it’s still in the alpha stage, it’s hard for them to discuss the program’s potential without a modicum of excitement:

BitTorrent Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers. Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code.

This alpha allows BitTorrent to move beyond desktop clients. We believe web developers are pioneers when it comes to creating beautiful, intuitive user experiences. Torque will empower them to create powerful applications that will appeal to broad audiences.

Considering the ideas some have when “torrents” are mentioned, it’s clear there are many more options available than just sharing ripped movies and music. That being said, the majority of the apps being created are to make the act of file sharing that much easier. As an example, the four featured apps over at the BitTorrent Torque Labs offer such capabilities:

Turns all torrents links into regular downloads. No torrents to manage. Just content.

And:

Create a sharable link to a file on your computer. No cloud, no hosting. Just a link directly to your file.

So while the capabilities increase, it doesn’t look like the associations that are made when the word “torrent” is used will be going away anytime soon.

The new service called boxupus combines the power of torrents and Dropbox into one, easy to use service. Users can add torrents to Dropbox and the files will be downloaded to the digital file locker for all who share the account. The creators told TorrentFreak that the service is meant to bring torrents into the future that is the Cloud.

The main benefit of being part of the cloud is that the downloads are taken care of by the team at boxupus. It means that all torrents downloaded by users will be tied to boxupus making it essentially anonymous for all who use it. The other benefit is that users can start downloads of torrents no matter where they are and have them available via Dropbox at any time.

The company has had to answer to allegations that they have become a new Megaupload since they added the public folder option. They responded to the allegations by removing the ability to create public folders, but users can share their Dropbox accounts so it’s kind of moot point. It remains to be seen how they will respond to the existence of boxopus.

If you want to try out boxopus for yourself, just hit up their Web site. It’s free for now while it’s in beta, but the creators told TorrentFreak that they have plans to monetize the service in the future. As for those monetization plans, it will probably be similar to how Dropbox monetizes its storage.

TorrentFreak points out that KickAssTorrents has only been in operation for a few years after getting its start back in 2009. The relatively young site has since shot up through the torrent rankings to become the third most popular torrent tracker on the net.

With such fame also comes greater scrutiny from governmental forces who view such sites as harbingers of piracy and content theft. That’s exactly what a court in Italy has done as it has just concluded an investigation into the site. They have found the torrent tracker to be a “super pirate platform.”

The investigation also led to some interesting statistics about the site in general. It is host to 10 million torrents and receives over 3 million visits daily from pretty much all over the world. It’s problematic in Italy because the country is the third most popular country of origin.

According to the Guardia di Finanza, a department under Italy’s Minster of Economy and Finance, the site is more offensive than others because it profits off of piracy through advertising. They estimate that KickAssTorrents brings in $8.5 million a year from advertising.

As we all know by now, these kind of censorship tactics don’t help curb piracy whatsoever. People will obviously find a way around the censorship, like they have with The Pirate Bay in the UK, using simple DNS switchers or proxies.

TorrentFreak points out that the specifics of the blockade are not being made immediately known, but the GdF has only mentioned kickasstorrents.com so far. The funny thing is that kickasstorrents.com is no longer in use by the Web site. It only servers to redirect users to the new site, kat.ph.

It remains to be seen if the Italian blockade will take this into account or only block the already useless domain. If so, it will just once again prove that law enforcement that’s backed by the copyright industry is generally incompetent when it comes to enforcing Internet law.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider says that the site is being hammered by a DDoS attack. The attack is leaving the site unavailable to many people around the world. I have tried to access the site multiple times and have had no luck in even reaching the home page. This is uncharted territory for me as I never thought I would have seen The Pirate Bay being attacked in such a way.

TorrentFreak suggests that some members of Anonymous may be behind the attack. The Pirate Bay publicly called out the group last week for taking down the Virgin Media Web site. They said that a DDoS attack amounts to censorship and that Anonymous was in the wrong.

Anonymous is a big fan of The Pirate Bay and have offered protection and tips around censorship on multiple occasions. It’s hard to believe that anybody within Anonymous would turn on The Pirate Bay in such a way. On the other hand, there is no central leadership within Anonymous and members can do whatever they want, even to the detriment of the group.

My best guess here is that some splinter cell within Anonymous took personal offense to The Pirate Bay’s message on Facebook last week. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Anonymous isn’t saying anything about the downtime at the moment, however, so it’s still hard to really grasp what exactly is going on.

All we can say is that The Pirate Bay will be back sooner or later. They’ve been down before and the team knows how to get it back up. Until then, how about you peruse the thousand other torrent trackers out there.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider said that the news circulating through all the major news networks like BBC and The Guardian equated to free publicity. They said that The Pirate Bay saw 12 million more visitors than usual after the story started to go live. They even suggested that The Pirate Bay should write a “thank you note” to the British Phonographic Industry, the group who instigated the case that ruled the torrent tracking site to be behind “copyright infringement on a massive scale.”

The Pirate Bay sees this increase in traffic as only a good thing as it will give them time to educate new users how to get around what they see as pitiful efforts by governments to prevent access to their site. Our own Chris Richardson covered the majority of these solutions in his story on Monday. The gist is that users can use free services to change their DNS servers and any censorship is immediately circumvented. There’s also services like Tor and iPredator that help get around such blocks.

I think we can draw a parallel between The Pirate Bay’s very public ISP block in the UK and MegaUpload’s very public takedown. Both sites were very well known and make up a good chunk of Internet traffic. Both sites are hit with some form of censorship that goes very public across multiple news networks. In the case of MegaUpload, file sharing went down immediately after the takedown. Unfortunately for the copyright industry, it went right back to pre-takedown levels the next day after everybody moved on to another service. I’m pretty sure that The Pirate Bay expects the same thing to happen in the UK. Even if they don’t use The Pirate Bay, they’ll figure out a way to obtain the files they’re after.

As TorrentFreak points out, not everybody will be prepared to circumvent the block when it goes into effect. There will be some people who hear about The Pirate Bay and then find out later that it has been blocked. Will they search Google for one of many easy solutions or will they just give up and buy the legitimate product? I think it’s too early to tell, but The Pirate Bay will probably still see plenty of action from UK citizens.

Do you think The Pirate Bay will continue to thrive in the UK? Or will the blockade reduce piracy in the country? Let us know in the comments.