The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has announced that seven servers part of the eDonkey file-sharing network were shut down this week in Germany after a court granted injunctions. The servers in Germany were responsible for maintaining an index of shared files on people's computers – they did not store the actual files but were integral for searching on the network. The IFPI claims that this action along with other recent shutdowns of eDonkey servers in the Netherlands and France has disabled use of the network to one million users, about a third of the total.
According to Ipoque, a company that specializes in traffic analysis and management, use of the eDonkey file sharing network varies from 5% to 50% of Internet traffic and varies by region. Although eDonkey is losing users to BitTorrent, currently the most frequently used p2p service, it remains popular enough for pirates to want to keep it alive. I would be very surprised if new servers did not quickly appear in replacement of the offline ones.
News source: InfoWorld
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