Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday stepped up their fight against internet piracy by pursuing lawsuits against people in the US and Europe who operate servers that relay digitised movie files across computer networks such as BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is one of a handful of new internet ?peer-to-peer? file-sharing services that have gained popularity after the music and movie industries started cracking down on networks such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. Hollywood is concerned about BitTorrent and eDonkey, also targeted by the lawsuits, because the software was designed to let internet users quickly share large files such as movies or video games.