News reached us at PC Pro today that popular torrent website The Pirate Bay has cracked the Alexa top 100 – a list of the most-visited sites on the internet – and there doesn’t seem to be much that anybody can do about it.

It’s not the only torrent portal on the list, either, with Mininova sitting pretty at number 52. That’s higher than whole host of hugely popular and well-respected sites – about.com, for instance, languishes at number 78, and popular bohemian hangout DeviantArt lurks at 77. Blogging behemoth LiveJournal is just behind, too, at 56.

All this is evidence that the pirating of illegal files – be it games, movies, music or software – is a huge business. If it were legitimate, it’d probably be discussed as a burgeoning industry worth investing in. And, with the much-vaunted credit crunch upon us, people acquiring their favourite games, albums and movies from less-than-legal sources is, surely, going to rise. Couple a lack of disposable income with the proliferation of unlimited broadband deals and, surely, piracy will get worse.

And, yet, what can be done about it? The popularity seems to be akin to a bloke in the local pub offering around some dodgy merchandise he’s ‘acquired’ – a bit like Twiggy in The Royle Family – but on a much larger scale. Schemes have already been trialled: Starforce was meant to stop games being copied, but just infuriated hordes of gamers, who probably ran straight to The Pirate Bay to find a healthily-seeded torrent of Call of Duty 4. Crytek, developers of Crysis, our 3D benchmark game of choice, has already announced that future titles will be console-centric, such is the cost to their company of piracy.

Steam, surely, is the way it should be done. It’s been adopted by thousands of gamers and provides a simple way for people to buy and download games. The massive increase in the number of users and games available suggests that they’re doing something right.

And, yet, the piracy continues – it seems that experienced internet users believe that they should be getting everything for nothing these days. Another school of thought suggests that people ‘try before they buy’, and download a game, or an album, before shelling out for a physical copy if they’re suitably impressed. Undoubtedly, though, plenty of people are helping themselves to whatever they want with little fear of repercussions – as with the bloke in the pub with a bag of dodgy jeans, there’s little that can be done to stop it.

It’s an odd conundrum, and one that’s cost more than just lost sales: jobs, homes, cars and companies have, no doubt, been lost as a result of more people pilfering things for free than paying full price. It’s certainly an issue, and one that hasn’t been solved yet. So, what do you think? Are you an avid, rum-drinking pirate of the cyber-seas, or do you make a point of paying full price for software, CDs and movies that you think are worth it?

And how would you put a stop to such a destructive practise?