Over the two years between 20В when they conducted their research, they found that those doing the heaviest monitoring of file sharing activity were large internet service providers that rent out server space, host websites and offer otherВ computer services forВ big clients. Monitoring of file-sharing sites has been documented in the past, but Chothia and his colleagues wanted to get a better sense of the extent and type of monitoring going on. 'We wondered what kind of evidence people would actually need to take action against someone.' Monitoring being done on behalf of others 'The work we did partly resulted out of these court cases where people have been threatened with legal action,' Chothia said. The most high-profile court cases against file sharing have generally been those targeting theВ administrators of largeВ file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHuntВ and Megaupload, but there have also beenВ numerousВ attemptsВ to sue individual usersВ forВ illegal downloading activity. The Pirate Bay is one of the file-sharing sites that has been most actively pursued by authorities and made headlinesВ againВ this week after one of its co-founders was arrested in Cambodia and threatened with deportationВ to Sweden, where he has been convicted of copyright violations and faces a one-year prison sentence. There could well have been a lot of monitoring which we didn't see, as well.'

'What we've shown is that there is very largeвЂ“scale monitoring going on. Svartholm Warg was arrested this week in Cambodia and will be deported to Sweden.

All three were convicted of assisting copyright infringement and face prison sentences of four months to a year. Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, far left, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde leave a court in Stockholm in March 2009.

Doom 2016 torrent being tracked