Users downloading their favorite movies, TV shows from BitTorrent are probably being watched: Study

Sydney - Torrent file downloaders, who may have downloaded a popular movie, TV show or music album from BitTorrent sites like Pirate Bay are more likely to have been monitored and tracked, a study has revealed.
 
According to a report published by researchers from the University of Birmingham, the first of its kind study offers a tremendous amount of information about the extent to which various organisations are monitoring file sharing via BitTorrent.
 
To determine the extent to which such sharing is monitored, the researchers actually created and operated their own "monitoring client" to gather data about newly published torrent files from the Top 100 in each category on The Pirate Bay, News.com.au reports.
 
The researchers were able to identify 1139 IP addresses linked up to the BitTorrent network that they believe were monitoring users around the world. Those IP addresses belong to copyright enforcement organizations, security companies and government research labs, according to the report.
 
The study also found that many of the suspicious IPs used third-party hosting companies, were intended to serve "as a front to disguise their identities." Sixteen addresses were "assigned to a medium-sized computer security consultancy company that does not publicly acknowledge monitoring BitTorrent."
 
BitTorrent websites allow people to download files from many users at one time. Sites such as the Pirate Bay don't host copyrighted content, instead, they host "torrent" files, which are links to media files stored on other users' computers in other parts of the world.
 
BitTorrent is the latest generation of the peer-to-peer file sharing that began in 1999 with Napster.