The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is following the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) footsteps by filing lawsuits against BitTorrent clients.

The MPAA is working with police from the United Kingdom and the United States to shut illegitimate websites that support BitTorrent files and links. BitTorrent is one of the largest P2P networks that let users download files from simultaneous connections without effecting performance.

The MPAA, with help from local police, shut down few websites throughout Europe.

During the raid, police took personal computers and servers that contained the movie files in questions.

According to reports, the MPAA currently has around 100 users on the list for lawsuits. These users include both file traders and content sharers.

The MPAA reported that it loses around $3.5 billion to piracy every year, which excludes loses from P2P trading.

Industry analysts, however, have different viewpoints on movie piracy; according to them, MPAA shouldn’t face too much risk from online piracy considering that it takes quite a bit of time to download large image files, many users are disappointed at the image quality, and they have no choice, but to watch it on their computers, at least majority of the time.

They said MPAA have other revenue models to support the rightful copyright holders with DVD sales, movie ticket sales, pay-per-view sales and other partnerships with television networks.