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A federal court ruled earlier this week that the eDonkey network allowed the trade of copyright content and was thus illegal.

A notice on the eDonkey website now reads: 'The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available. If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law. Courts around the world - including the United States Supreme Court - have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted

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for illegal downloading.'

Along with eDonkey, another file-sharing network called Overnet, owned by the same parent company Metamachine, has also been deemed illiegal.

As legal online music services have flourished, so the record industry has had increased success at shutting down filesharing services over which it alleges millions of dollars' worth of copyright content is made available.

In June, the owners of KaZaA, Sharman Networks, agreed a $100m settlement and promised to offer a legitimate service instead.

BitTorrent has been more successful in pre-empting such court action by entering discussions with the record industry, including reaching an agreement with Warner Brothers to distribute paid-for content across the network. However, certain iterations of the service, such as Elite Torrents have been shut down after federal investigations.