Faster broadband connections, meaning more peer-to-peer program usage, could mean another five years of growth for online piracy of copyright music, film, and other media, a British research firm said September 22 in a new study.
"(W)e think the peer-to-peer problem is going to only get worse," said Informa Media's Simon Dyson, who wrote the study, to Reuters. "In 2008, broadband will be prevalent around the world."
Informa's study indicated among other things that while CD sales online and song downloads from pay services like Apple's iTunes will hit $3.9 billion by 2008, the value of lost sales – thanks to CD burning and P2P downloading – will hit $4.7 billion in the same period.
And, according to Dyson, P2P file sharing programs are turning up in Russian and Chinese, undermining the music and film industries' bids toward building new and loyal customer bases in those markets. "This is where the industry's growth is supposed to come from," he told Reuters.
The good news, according to Informa, is that online sales will take about 12 percent of the entire international music market by 2008, a rise from this year's 4.5 percent, thanks to their recent pushes to make more product available for online acquisition or download.
