ReadWriteWeb

If recent crackdowns against file-sharing were meant as a warning shot to other site owners, it has indeed been heard loud and clear. First, sites like FileSonic and FileServe voluntarily scaled back their functionality, while others vocally defended their own practices in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown.

Today, popular BitTorrent index BTjunkie shut itself down to preempt legal action of the type experienced by the Pirate Bay, Megaupload and others. The seven-year-old site may not have been squashed directly by authorities, but it is nonetheless good news for the RIAA, MPPA and other opponents of online piracy.

Once upon a time, Google had a pretty nasty reputation among traditional media companies, many of whom lampooned the search giant for promoting piracy and even "stealing" content outright. Much of the criticism was overblown, but it remains true that there is copyright-infringing content on the Internet and Google is may people's gateway to the Internet.

Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.

Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.

How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

After Comcast was caught throttling Bit Torrent traffic on its networks in 2007, the company caught quite a lot of heat and voluntarily stopped doing so. The practice, which was then ruled by the FCC to be illegal, struck at the heart of the ongoing and contentious issue of net neutrality.

True to its word, Comcast has indeed backed off from throttling Bit Torrent traffic, as new data from Measurement Lab demonstrates. Three years ago, the company interfered with about half of all Bit Torrent traffic on its networks. Today, that number is down to 3%.

In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

It's been about a week since Fox instituted an eight-day waiting period for users who are not paying subscribers to either Hulu Plus or the Dish Network before they are allowed to stream new episodes of TV shows. Under the new authentication program, only those willing to pay up can watch new episodes the day after it airs. Everybody else has to wait.

Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak.

Although some people would like to blame P2P traffic for Internet piracy, that's not a completely accurate assessment. Case in point, the release today of the Australian horror film The Tunnel. The movie is being released simultaneously on TV, DVD, and yes BitTorrent - the first film to have this sort of global distribution on release day. The movie was recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and will be on the big screen in Sydney in June.

Although as we reported yesterday, Netflix now surpasses P2P Internet traffic - in North America at least - but this doesn't mean that this isn't a popular avenue by which many people access movie entertainment. Rather than fighting BitTorrent, the makers of The Tunnel are embracing it.

The BBC announced last month that it would be slashing much of its online programming due to severe budget cuts. As part of the cutbacks, it planned to axe jobs and websites. Some 172 of those websites are scheduled to not just go dormant but to actually be deleted within the coming year.

But one good online citizen - an anonymous one at that - has taken the time to spider and archive the endangered content and provide the material in a BitTorrent file (available here).

Searching for file-sharing information via Google is going to take a little bit more effort now, thanks to new steps taken by the search engine to remove all sorts of references to torrents from its instant search and autocomplete features.

In December, Google said it was taking steps towards "making copyright work better online." Among other things, it promised that "terms that are closely associated with piracy" would no longer appear in autocompletes.

The company BitTorrent announced a significant milestone today: 100 million monthly active users of its software, BitTorrent Mainline and µTorrent.

These clients use the BitTorrent protocol, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that's used to distribute large amounts of data. Rather than downloading a file from a single source, BitTorrent allows users to join a "swarm" of hosts that can upload and download files in pieces.