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Future of BitTorrent sites in doubt

As per the statement issued by the Motion Picture Aassociation of America (MPAA) in May 2005, the MPAA has announced that it is filing lawsuits against six highly trafficked BitTorrent websites responsible for the illegal swapping of millions of dollars of motion picture and television programming. This is the first time that the MPAA has targeted TV-oriented sites for illegally swapping TV shows which has become a serious and growing problem. Below is a list of the six BitTorrent sites being sued by the MPAA: 1. ShunTV 2. Zonatracker 3. Btefnet 4. Scifi-Classics 5. CDDVDHeaven 6. Bragginrights

For the knowledge of those who are still new to Bittorent phenomena, here is a brief explanation of what Bittorent is: "BitTorrent" is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted at CodeCon 2002. Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially when the peers are on ADSL connections. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users. This concept of downloading files is superior to programs like KaZaA which take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source, or peer.

It takes hours to download say, an episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. In fact, analysts at Cache Logic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Such popularity will inevitable attract the attention of organisationlike the MPAA.

Bittorent can be a very useful and powerful way of sharing and downloading files as long as the users know the limits of their action online. There are sites who has taken steps to provide its members an online place to share and download their MP3 and movies without the risk of getting into legal problem.