The content industry has been actively pursuing torrent sites. They are doing so to keep an eye on the data that is being shared as well as the users who share those. In the past, it has been reported that a few organizations keep eye on torrent users. But now, a new research reveals the sheer number of organizations monitoring torrents.

This new research has been carried out by computer scientists at the University of Birmingham, England. In the course of three years, these researchers attempted to see exactly how many ‘users’ were monitoring BitTorrent websites.

BitTorrent websites typically aggregate links which help a user connect up with other users to download data. The sites themselves don’t exactly host copyright content. The computer scientists at University of Birmingham had to create a monitoring client of their own in order to find out who was monitoring BitTorrent sites.

According to the results divulged by their study, they identified 1139 IP addresses which they believe were monitoring the torrent users around the globe. So who exactly owned these IP addresses? From law enforcement agencies to government labs and security companies such as Peer Media; these IP addresses were owned by different companies.

Apparently, security companies typically were assigned the tasks of monitoring specific types of content and see how many and which users downloaded that content. Some of these companies even used third-party hosting companies to disguise their true identity.

We reported earlier that the torrent monitoring activity has significantly bumped over recent times. U.S. authorities are apparently on the way to enact anti-piracy measures and that security companies are actively gathering relevant data. The finding of the report, per se, don’t come as a surprise. However, what is rather interesting is that thousands of IPs have been deployed by such monitoring organizations to keep a look on the torrent users.

Courtesy: Brisbane Times

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