Shortly after Hollywood launched a major offensive against Internet pirates last month, two popular Web sites for stealing movies shut down.
But no sooner had Suprnova.org and Bittorrent.org pulled the plug then copycat sites appeared in their place. What’s more, BitTorrent, the technology targeted in the movie industry crackdown, appears to be as popular as ever.
BitTorrent remains the most common “peer-to-peer” technology used by Internet users looking to swap files, both legal and illegal, according to CacheLogic, a British company that monitors peer-to-peer traffic. CacheLogic estimates that just over half of all Internet file-sharing uses BitTorrent software.
In general there has been very little reduction in the levels of BitTorrent traffic across the globe,” said Andrew Parker, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. “As many of the (BitTorrent) sites…were being shut down, new ones sprung up.”
Parker said he was surprised that BitTorrent usage has not noticeably declined. He noted that when the music industry launched its counteroffensive against Internet pirates by suing users of Kazaa, then the No. 1 peer-to-peer service, file-swappers quickly shifted to newer technologies, including BitTorrent and another one called eDonkey.
The massive shift away from Kazaa took about two months, said Parker.
But with BitTorrent, a similar exodus isn’t happening — at least not yet. And that speaks both to the wiliness of the BitTorrent technology and the big obstacles that Hollywood faces as it tries to avoid a crisis similar to the one that struck the music industry when Napster set off what amounted to a massive online looting of songs.
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