ISP AT&T has been awarded a new patent for technology that will allow it to track content being exchanged via file-sharing.

The company has said that the technology could be used to detect pirate downloads as well as deal with congestion on its network.

With this just being the patenting stage, there is no indication yet on how, when and to what extent such technology could be implemented in practice.

The system focuses specifically on torrents gathered from search engines ...