Is your BitTorrent usage being monitored by copyright bots?

The University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has been researching how users of the hugely popular file-sharing BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol are being monitored by those acting for copyright holders. What the researchers found surprised them, and may surprise those using BitTorrent to download pirated content: the average time it takes to log the IP address of an illegal file sharer is now less than three hours of the pirated content being made available. The researchers reckon that those downloading a single pirated movie, if it is in the top 100 downloads, will be monitored and their IP address logged. Such content is monitored, on average, within three hours of being made available to share.