Free Republic

Anyone using file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the latest film or music release is likely to be monitored, UK-based researchers suggest. A Birmingham University study indicates that an illegal file-sharer downloading popular content would be logged by a monitoring firm within three hours. The team said it was "surprised" by the scale of the monitoring. Copyright holders could use the data to crack down on illegal downloads. The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it. BitTorrent is a...

The Internet isn't the anonymous playground of free goodies that many once thought it was. In fact, your online behavior could land you across the courtroom from a multibillion-dollar industry. The Recording Industry Association of America is cracking down on Web surfers who it claims have shared copyrighted music files over the Internet. The organization, which represents record labels, has sent hundreds of subpoenas in the past month to Internet service providers for the identities of file sharers, and it plans to begin filing lawsuits later this month and next month. The following questions and answers are intended to shed...