Oh, BitTorrent is down! Ok, We'll Just Have To Turn To eDonkey!

Data released on Monday shows that file sharers have shifted to eDonkey network, after BitTorrent has fallen in a wake of a crackdown on piracy.

Last year, BitTorrent was consuming up to a third of the Internet's total bandwidth as users traded huge movie and television files.

Hollywood struck back with several lawsuits to shut down Web sites that provided "tracker" links, which tell the network where to look for files.

U.S. has also witnessed a sudden return to popularity of the Gnutella file-sharing network, which had faded after an earlier crackdown by music companies.

As for eDonkey, a study by the Cambridge-based Internet analysis firm CacheLogic found that eDonkey is now roughly on par with BitTorrent in the U.S, China, Japan and Britain, though it is the dominant peer-to-peer file-sharing network in South Korea, which is known to have the world's highest percentage of high-speed Internet use, and also in Italy, Spain and Germany.

In a precedent-setting ruling earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against P2P firm Grokster, which held the firm liable for the movies and music traded on its networks.

But that didn't fulfill Hollywood's expectations, as the P2P traffic enlarges each passing year.

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