Sneaky Sharing.

This article focuses on the illegal digital music and movie trading in the U.S., as of October 2004. According to Com-Score, BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) network nearly doubled in users, EMule grew from under 100,000 users to nearly 300,000, and EDonkey has made even bigger gains. These services may pose a greater threat to content owners than previous P-to-P networks. All three use an advanced technique called swarming, in which portions of files are downloaded from multiple sources and immediately offered to the network. The result: potentially faster downloads and more rapid propagation of content. And there are other options for pirated content. Internet newsgroups, best known by the collective name Usenet, offer a vast reservoir of music, movies, and software. In the past, the difficulty of using newsgroups, has stunted the growth of piracy on them. That could change, particularly with the emergence of user-friendly software that makes accessing content in newsgroups easier than dealing with the more unpredictable P-to-P services. But even if newsgroups become a more popular venue for illegal file trading, they are generally still public and easy to track. Private networks set up by file traders are harder to track or quantify.