Olympic Torrents at the Peak

The Olympics opening ceremony proved to have really fascinated the public as, this week, to whose surprise, it was again the most pirated TV-show of the week with nearly two million people downloading it. Of course, that could only upset the International Olympic Committee which is currently putting some pressure on the Swedish government to take measures against - do we really need to say? - The Pirate Bay. So, what did the International Olympic Committee (IOC) do at the sight of their shows flooding the BitTorrent sites? The first thing was sending a letter on August 18 to the Swedish Minister of Justice with the aforementioned request.

If we do a little math, the availability of Olympic events on BitTorrent has known a considerable increase (compared to the same event in 2004), in terms of both quantity and quality. Still, we didn’t expect China to be the country with the greatest demand for Olympic torrents; it accounted for as much as 65 per cent of the people who downloaded the Openings Ceremony.

As IOC declared, they have contacted The Pirate Bay asking them to remove the torrents, but receiving no answer directed their request to the Minister. However, the Pirate Bay infirms the fact: “The phone hasn’t rung. And I guess their e-mail probably got caught in the Chinese firewall, since TPB is blocked there”, says Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

The letter also formulates worries regarding the reiteration of the downloading wave. IOC makes a sad prediction for them: “We are also gravely concerned about the upcoming Closing Ceremony on August 24, as it is entirely predictable that illegal copies of that event will be immediately made available through the Pirate Bay.” They are right of course, and we’re afraid that the Swedish government can’t do much about it either.

Yesterday, the Minister did what apparently seems to be the only thing they can do against the site – blame it in a radio interview for being a bad promotion for Sweden (to the disagreement of many).

Here is this week’s chart of the most pirated TV-shows on BitTorrent, courtesy of the TorrentFreak which has collected the data from “a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only”:

Top Downloads August 10 - August 17

Ranking (last week) TV-show
1 (1) Olympics 2008 Opening Ceremony
2 (2) Weeds
3 (3) Eureka
4 (4) Generation Kill
5 (5) Burn Notice
6 (back) Stargate Atlantis
7 (new) Fifth Gear
8 (10) Mad Men
9 (6) Psych
10 (back) Mythbusters