The Batman sequel The Dark Knight was a smash hit at the box office, with $400 million in U.S. ticket sales in its first 18 days after release and more than $1 billion in sales globally so far. But the title achieved another significant milestone: It amassed over one million illegal downloads on BitTorrent in less than seven days.

The data, published by Torrent Freak, includes DVD rips, DVD screeners and R5 rips – and makes The Dark Knight most pirated movie of last week and the likely candidate to earn the title of the most pirated movie of the year.

The movie became hugely popular on BitTorrent when DVD rips appeared about a week ago. Another popular sharing site, The Pirate Bay, actually celebrated the arrival of the DVD version. The movie became available for download within less than 24 hours of the DVD release and attracted quite some attention.

If we look at the aggregated download numbers of early cam screeners and DVD rips that followed, The Dark Knight is on track to surpass “Transformers”, “Iron Man” and “The Incredible Hulk” to become the most pirated movie of 2008. According to TorrentFreak, the most pirated movies in the last week were The Dark Knight, Traitor, Tropic Thunder, WALL-E and Stepbrothers.

The most pirated movies of 2007 reportedly were Transformers, Knocked Up, Shooters, Pirates Of The.Caribbean At World’s End and Ratatouille.

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