by Steven Musil
February 19, 2009 9:10 PM PST

Despite extreme measures to prevent U2's new album from appearing prematurely on the Internet, copies of the band's "No Line on the Horizon" have begun circulating on file-swapping networks--a full week before its official release.

CD-quality copies of the band's 12th album, which is slated for release in Ireland on February 27 and worldwide on March 3, started appearing Wednesday on BitTorrent and now reportedly number in the hundreds of thousands.

Copies were also found circulating on LimeWire. After four tracks from the forthcoming album leaked on to the Internet last summer, the band decided not to send review copies of the album to the press, opting instead to have "listening parties" where journalists were prohibited from possessing recording devices--including cell phones.

The leak is likely to raise the ire of U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who has waged a vocal campaign against file-swapping sites and even blamed some tech heavyweights with facilitating piracy. McGuinness wants to fight file sharing by forcing Internet service providers to ban people who pirate music, and suggested last year that Apple and other makers of digital music players were wrongly profiting from their "burglary kits."