"There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 to 400,000 feature-length films being downloaded per day," said Andrew Frank, a technology consultant with Viant, who's researching the trend for movie studio clients.

Frank said the number of movies downloaded has doubled in the last year and a half.

Movie pirating might not yet be ready for prime time -- even over the fastest connection, it typically takes hours to download a full-length film. File-exchange sites like Gnutella and Hotline, which act as matchmakers for people who want to exchange movies and other copyrighted material, aren't nearly as easy to use as the popular music-exchange program Napster[...]