"Snatch", the latest gangster movie from British director Guy Ritchie, has the unenviable honour of being the most pirated movie on the Internet, according to a survey.
The film, a tale of gangland London, was downloaded onto around a million computers worldwide in June, according to the US anti-piracy research company Mediaforce.
Other films to make the top 10 of Web pirated movies included current box office hits such as "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider", "Shrek" and "Pearl Harbor".
Mediaforce said the figures, which come at a time when the music industry is fighting its own battle against Internet piracy, underscored Hollywood's susceptibility to piracy on the Web.
"(It) demonstrates that online movie piracy is a very real threat to the movie production industry, especially when three of our top 10 are current, first-run production movies," said Mediaforce chief executive Aaron Fessier.
"This isn't a real abstract format where people are trading third-run movies. This is hit, current-production stuff out there and freely available."
The film industry suffers a potential loss in revenues each time a movie is downloaded from the Internet. Exact figures are not yet available, but the Motion Picture Association of America has estimated that overall piracy, including cheap video copies, currently costs its member studios more than US$2.5 billion each year.
While the means of piracy distribution has gone hi-tech, the means of gaining the material has remained the same - bootleggers take video cameras into cinemas.
"(The films) haven't been released yet on DVD or VHS. But then we realised that people must be taking digital camcorders into films," Fessler said.
The footage is then copied onto a PC, using the latest technology to compress the film into a format small enough to fit on a single CD.
The film can then be "shared" on the Internet in much the same way as song-swap companies such as Napster make music available to their members.
Film studios are therefore facing a problem on the scale of that experienced by the music industry with Napster, which at one time boasted more than 40 millions users trading music free over the Web.
