An Internet Monitoring company has said that Casino Royale (review) has already been downloaded illegally from the Internet over 200,000 times and that two versions were online after the first screening in cinemas.

Dr David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, said: "There are now several million active digital pirates."

Okay. Couple of points straight off the bat for this story from The Scotsman.

The films have not been downloaded illegally, the film itself is illegal. The downloading has been carried out in a perfectly legal manner, it's just the content that is illegal. Sorry, just had to get that small semanticism off my chest. There's a difference between putting the blame on the downloading system or the uploading of the source illegal content.

Secondly, I never really trust companies like this, it's like anti-virus companies. They make their living from the problem so it's in their best interest to ensure the figures look really bleak.

Still, it sounds like they have a handle on where the two source copies have come from:

The first, apparently from Russia, featured video apparently shot on camcorder over the heads of a cinema audience and featuring a poor quality soundtrack and was on the web late on Friday. By Saturday morning, a higher quality copy, possibly from Italy, went online.

The main thing that irks me is that they don't know how many of these people have actually seen the film, or are going to see the film, in the cinema too. Nor how many end up buying the film on DVD.

What are your views? Are you willing to tell us if you've seen the pirate version and what your views are on the matter? Will you also see it in the cinema or on DVD?