(4 January 2010 8:10 pm)

MUMBAI: Piracy, the world over, has crossed extreme limits. Not only has pirates expanded their cobwebs in India, they have mushroomed in several places in the world in all formats of piracy.

Online pirates came out with more than 20 million copies of Star Trek and the sequel to Transformers giving the two Paramount Pictures releases the dubious distinction of being the most ripped-off films of the year, according to a report released by file-sharing tracking service, TorrentFreak.

Though the Transformers sequel bettered Star Trek at the box-office, Trekkie favourites Kirk and Spock were more popular than morphing car-robots among digital thieves.

TorrentFreak reported that Star Trek was illegally downloaded just under 11 million times, while 10.6 million copies of Transformers were copied.

While the exact data is difficult to get, pirated copies certainly seem to have cost Viacom. For the period ended 30 September, worldwide revenue at the Viacom-owned studio fell 13 per cent to $3.7 billion.

Other films on TorrentFreak's top 10 most illegally-downloaded list include films like The Hangover, Twilight, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The list also includes films like Knowing, State of Play and District 9 which do not rank in the top 20 in terms of box-office gross.

"As we look over the rest of the top 10, we see that there are quite a few differences between popularity at the box office and on [rogue file sharer] BitTorrent," said TorrentFreak of its report.

Though Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and 2012 rank second and fourth based on their worldwide grosses, but they didn't make it into the top 10 list of most swapped movies.

The illegal downloads could also cost Viacom-owned Paramount bragging rights. Warner Bros currently ranks as the highest-grossing studio overall, bringing in just under $2 billion for the year.