Content creators are happy to argue the same rhetoric over and over again on how online piracy is raging havoc in the established industries and continue to ask for ever-increasing penalties for users guilty or just accused of illegal sharing. At the same time, the industry is happy to ignore actual hard numbers that indicate that piracy may not be that detrimental to revenues and in some cases it may actually help.

A perfect example is Hollywood's latest blockbuster, and likely its biggest to date, Avatar, which has seen a massive box-office success. Expectantly, the movie is a huge hit on file-sharing networks as well; yet, this doesn't seem to be affecting theater ticket sales in the least bit. James Cameron's latest flick enjoyed its fourth weekend of record box-office revenue bringing total international gross at over $1.3 billion. This makes it the second biggest selling movie of all time, only after Cameron's previous movie, 1997's Titanic.

The movie is doing great in the US, where it now holds the record for the highest fourth weekend sales at over $48 million, but also internationally where it made a further $143 million. Yet, the movie has been available on BitTorrent file-sharing networks even before it hit the theaters in the US. Since then, it has constantly held the number one or number two spots in the TorrentFreak, a popular blog dedicated to all things BitTorrent, weekly charts of the most downloaded movies on the file-sharing networks.

This week, it is at number 1 again. TorrentFreak doesn't release the actual number of downloads, but it is likely to be in the millions, likely even in the tens of millions right now, after it managed to get 500,000 downloads in the first two days it was available.

By the movie industry's regular arguments, this just shouldn't be happening. But not only piracy hasn't affected ticket sales, Fox Studios is remarkably calm about the whole situation. The reason for this is actually a solid one, the movie was created with a 3D cinema experience in mind and watching a copy on your laptop doesn't even come close to going to the actual theater. While it's unlikely that future releases will benefit from the same attitude towards piracy from the movie studios, it could be that they are finally realizing that they'll have to offer movie goers compelling reasons to go to the cinema rather than watch a movie at home, from the only source they can get it, online file-sharing.