Pirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites today.

A search on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday.

As of Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 1,800 “seeders” — the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file — and about 8,500 “leechers,” or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate, Build 7000, according to users commenting on the site and elsewhere on the Internet.

Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, listed the beta build as a 2.44GB download.

This is not the first time Windows 7 has escaped from Microsoft’s limited testing pool. Just hours after the company unveiled an earlier version at its Professional Developers Conference in late October, the alpha edition hit BitTorrent.

Users first reported the newest Windows 7 leak on Neowin.net’s forums Friday, with the opening message and screenshots coming from someone identified as “+fivestarVIP”, who said he was from Beijing, China.

Build 7000 is what Microsoft will issue next month as Windows 7 Beta, according to other reports by Windows bloggers who have copies. Paul Thurrott, for example, posted a review and screenshots of Build 7000 today on his “SuperSite for Windows” site, naming it as the Beta build.

Although Microsoft has promised to open the beta to all users in early 2009, it has been mum on an exact release date. Information published on its own Web site earlier this month, however, hinted that the beta will be available no later than Jan. 13.

Some commentators and bloggers have maintained that Microsoft may release the beta as early as Jan. 7, after CEO Steve Ballmer delivers a keynote that evening at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he is expected to talk about Windows 7.

It’s something of an open secret that Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox Web browser, gets most of its funding from Google — 91 percent, to be exact. The deal gives Google top placement in Firefox’s search engine bar. But now that Google is also shipping Chrome, its own branded browser, some critics are asking whether the search engine giant’s deep pockets have allowed it to gain too much influence over the Web browser market.

The technologies used to build Web pages — including HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) — are all open standards, maintained by industry consortia. No one company owns them. But experimental features often appear in new browser releases first, then are integrated into the official standards later. One example is Google’s Gears technology, which is built into Chrome and is available as a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Gears is widely expected to influence the upcoming HTML 5 standard.

That’s all well and good, except that arguably only Microsoft can compete with Google’s share of the browser market. For example, Opera is a longstanding alternative browser that is often praised for its compliance with Web standards, but its market share is but a fraction of that of Firefox or IE. Because of Opera’s narrower reach, a new feature introduced in Opera might be seen as less significant, and therefore be less likely to become part of the public standards.