The year is almost over so we're going to spend its final few hours looking back at the biggest news events in the file-sharing world during 2012. Which TorrentFreak articles were read the most, which received the most comments, and what were the biggest file-sharing news stories of the year?

The past year has been an eventful one, starting with the historic SOPA and PIPA protests that carried over from 2011.

Eventually both bills were defeated.

Then there was the Megaupload raid and the indictment against the “Mega Conspiracy” which dominated the news the entire year and disrupted the file-hosting business.

There were also winners in 2012, such as the ACTA protesters, Rojadirecta and thousands of alleged BitTorrent users who had their cases dismissed.

And there were those who “lost” or received bad news, such as Gottfrid Svartholm, the Ninjavideo team, the IMAGiNE release group, Demonoid, BTjunkie, NZBMatrix and others.

The Pirate Bay made dozens of headlines as well, some good and some bad. The infamous BitTorrent site ditched torrents and moved to the cloud to escape getting raided, and enjoyed a huge increase in traffic despite increased censorship worldwide.

At TorrentFreak we carefully select the stories we write, and all these articles are important to us. But, to make some kind of an objective ranking of the top stories we compiled a list of the Top 12 most-read and the most-commented upon news articles.

Of course we would love to hear which stories and events were most important to our readers so feel free to join the discussion.

And a Happy New Year to all of you all! We really appreciate your ongoing support and encouragement.

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Top 12 most-read news articles

Here are the most read news articles, each with hundreds of thousands of page views.



1. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop

2. Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB

3. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

4. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government

5. Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down

6. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online

7. Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips

8. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested

9. The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record

10. The Pirate Bay Moves to .SE Domain To Prevent Domain Seizure

11. Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay

12. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid

Top 12 most-discussed news articles

Here are the most commented articles, each with their respective comment count.



1. MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested (1202)

2. Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government (1087)

3. Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action (842)

4. BitTorrent Pirates Go Nuts After TV Release Groups Dump Xvid (816)

5. Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop (692)

6. BitTorrent Giant BTjunkie Shuts Down For Good (662)

7. Book Publishers ‘Shut Down’ Library.nu and iFile-it (662)

8. Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests (625)

9. Demonoid Is Back, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online (609)

10. Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof (601)

11. Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy (594)

12. ISPs To Begin Punishing BitTorrent Pirates This Summer (576)