Just when you thought the world was saturated with spy-flicks, Casino Royale - featuring a new face for the 007 agent - was launched the past week. Casino Royale, Bond No. 21, has managed to gross some 40 million dollars in the first week, but has also become a star of Internet piracy as pirate copies are rampant. According to statistics provided by Internet monitoring company Envisional, Casino Royale had been downloaded approximately 200,000 times via file sharing networks.

Casino Royale, staring actor Daniel Craig, was available on P2P networks just hours after the movie hit the theaters. Not only this, but - also in the wake of the movie - pirate Casino Royale DVDs were reported to be on sale in London and Scotland. The bootlegged versions of Casino Royale are believed to have originated from Russia and Italy via camcorders.

"By Saturday, regular downloaders could easily find copies of Casino Royale on a wide range of file-sharing networks," said David Price, head of Envisional. "BitTorrent makes it so easy get up-to-date content. The more people there are trying to download something, the faster it spreads. It has revolutionized the speed at which pirated movies propagate."

It is estimated that Internet piracy has cost Hollywood studios no less than $8 billion in 2005.