On the 22nd of July this year, one of the biggest file sharing websites was shut down by officials.

According to the story of TechCrunch, KickassTorrents (KAT) was forcefully closed down when the owner of the website had his location tracked following a legal purchase of an item on iTunes.

This week, yet another file sharing site was closed, indicating a massive shift in the manner of how online piracy is being organised.

Variety reports that the Torrentz file sharing site has been taken offline, but the reasoning has less to do with the legalities of the situation, and more simply to do with the decline in popularity of file-sharing online.

While Torrentz.eu had been ranked the 185th most visited website on the entire internet, it has been seen a steady decline as more and more people use streaming as their medium for online piracy, as opposed to the 'old-school' method of file-sharing and downloading.

Torrents and file-sharing now accounts for just 17% of online piracy, with streaming taking up a massive 74%, with direct download sites making up the remaining 9%.