He said there had been an estimated 200,000 downloads in the first few of days after the film's release and the losses to the film industry were running in the millions.
'By Saturday, regular downloaders could easily find copies of Casino Royale on a wide range of file-sharing networks,' said David Price, head of piracy intelligence at the internet monitoring firm Envisional.
With the prevalence of high speed broadband connections and greater awareness of BitTorrent distribution sites, studios fear that growing numbers of people are downloading free films and TV shows as a matter of course. Experts estimated yesterday that at least 250,000 copies had been downloaded, with the movie freely available on file-sharing websites within hours of going on general release.
