MUMBAI: BitTorrent extended its dominance as the most popular file sharing application for unauthorized content, and while infringements in the US have dropped, Spain, Italy and France have surged, according to an annual report on digital piracy issued by BayTSP.

The report, Online Trends & Insights – 2008, is based on cumulative data from all of BayTSP’s clients, which include movie studios, sports franchises, pay-per-view broadcasters, record labels, software companies, videogame developers and the publishing industry.

"BitTorrent and eDonkey are optimized for large file distribution and, despite the growing popularity of streaming video, are still where the majority of copyright infringement takes place. The US, which topped the list of countries with the most infringements in 2007, dropped to No. 4 behind Spain, Italy and France," said BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa.

Domestic Internet service providers Comcast, AT&T and Road Runner each had more than one million infringements of client content in 2008 while all of the top 10 international ISPs – including top ranked Telefonica De Espana (Spain), Telecom Italia (Italy) and France Telecom – had more than two million identified infringements each.

The average number of infringements found on university networks has held relatively steady since 2006 and infringements found on international university networks have shown a slight decline from 2007. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington and Boston University topped the list of domestic infringements while University of Botswana, Uppsala University (Sweden) and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) topped the list of international infringements on university networks.