"Hollywood studios filed a new round of lawsuits against file swappers on Thursday, for the first time using peer-to-peer companies' own data to track down individuals accused of trading movies online," reports CNet.
"The Motion Picture Association of America said it filed 286 lawsuits against people around the United States based on information acquired from file-trading sites shut down earlier in the year. Most of those sites were hubs connecting people using the BitTorrent technology, a peer-to-peer application designed for speeding downloads of large files."
As the story notes:
"BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has warned in the past that using his technology to distribute material illegally is a 'dumb idea,' because the file-swapping tool is not designed to hide the identity of anyone using it."
