Piracy of music and movies is becoming more rampant. In fact, it is so prevalent that people are now issuing year-end lists on piracy – it’s that significant.

TorrentFreak, a popular Bittorrent news site, has recently listed the most pirated films of 2011. According to the TorrentFreak list, the most downloaded (pirated) movie that was released last year was Fast Five, the fifth installment in the Fast and The Furious series of movies. The movie, which stars Paul Walker and Vin Diesel (returning to the franchise after appearing in just the first movie), posted more than nine million downloads over the year. Following Fast Five, the second most downloaded movie was The Hangover II. Third place is Thor. Each movie saw eight million downloads. The other movies that are included in the top ten list are:

• Source Code
• I Am Number Four
• Sucker Punch
• 127 Hours
• Rango
• The King’s Speech
• Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows 2

An interesting fact about the list is that the movies that occupied numbers two through five in terms of box office receipts (the movies that earned the most money) – Transformers: Dark of The Moon, Pirates of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 – were not in the list of the most downloaded movies. The four movies earned a combined 3.4 billion dollars globally last year.

Another interesting trend is that the total volume of downloads for 2011 is lower than the downloads tracked for 2010. The total download volume tracked for 2010 was 92 million. Only 72 million was tracked for 2011. The trend was also seen in the number of television shows that were downloaded last year.