Legal Issues
There has been much controversy over the use of BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store file contents. Whether the publishers of BitTorrent metafiles violate copyrights by linking to copyrighted material without the authorization of copyright holders is controversial.
Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against websites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of Suprnova.org, TorrentSpy, LokiTorrent, BTJunkie, Mininova, Demonoid and Oink's Pink Palace. The Pirate Bay torrent website, formed by a Swedish group, is noted for the "legal" section of its website in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publicly displayed. On 31 May 2006, The Pirate Bay's servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations by the MPAA of copyright infringement; however, the tracker was up and running again three days later.
In the study used to value NBC Universal in its merger with Comcast, Envisional found that all of the top 10,000 torrents on the BitTorrent network violated copyright.
Between 2010 and 2012, 200,000 people have been sued by copyright trolls for uploading and downloading copyrighted content through BitTorrent.
In 2011, 18.8% of North American internet traffic was used by peer-to-peer networks which equates to 132 billion music file transfers and 11 billion movie file transfers on the BitTorrent network.
On April 30, 2012 the UK High Court ordered five ISPs to block BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay.
Read more about this topic: BitTorrent
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