Well, folks, it looks like file sharing trends are changing yet once again. Experts say that due to the ongoing piracy crackdown on BitTorrent and its users, less and less people are using it. That said however, traffic/amount of users on P2P service eDonkey is on the rise. Also, networks such as Gnutella and KaZaA are slowly starting making a comeback. When the RIAA began going after KaZaA (and its users), it was fairly evident that some of its users got a bit nervous about getting sued for sharing music, and therefore there were significantly less users online at once. Now, the amount of online users on a typical weekday afternoon is approximately 2,515,000 people.

Adam Pasick at Reuters writes:

LONDON - Traffic in the popular file-sharing network BitTorrent has fallen in the wake of a crackdown on piracy, but file sharers have merely shifted to another network, eDonkey, new data released on Monday showed.

Popular movies like “Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith” have surfaced on BitTorrent before they even appeared in theatres.

A study by the Cambridge-based Internet analysis firm CacheLogic found that eDonkey is now roughly on par with BitTorrent in the United States, China, Japan and Britain.

It is the dominant peer-to-peer file-sharing network in South Korea, which has the world’s highest percentage of high-speed Internet use, and also in Italy, Spain and Germany.

“This is almost assuredly a result of the increased legal action toward the once-ignored BitTorrent - a game of P2P hide-and-seek,” said CacheLogic’s chief technology officer Andrew Parker.

[Continue reading Piracy crackdown spurs shift in online file-sharing]