Not even the threats of litigation are keeping the peer-to-peer community from swapping music and movies, according to a file-swapping analysis outfit which says P2P swapping is up 19 percent since June 2003. And music continues to be the big draw, with porn and other images coming in second, according to BigChampagne.
BigChampagne said it has determined 8.3 million people were online at any one time last month using KaZaA, eDonkey, and other P2P services, a jump from 6.8 million a year earlier. And Inside Digital Media says that finding is the best evidence yet that the Recording Industry Association of America’s subpoena-and-sue campaign against the file swappers isn’t doing what the music business hoped it would.
This seems to contradict earlier reports that suggested the music industry’s litigation campaign was proving to be a growing deterrent. "What people say and what they do are two different things," BigChampagne chief executive Eric Garland said announcing the new survey. "People were not willing to be forthright and admit to something that might get them sued. The fact is, peer-to-peer usage is much more widespread than it was a year ago."
“Many just don’t think they’ll be caught,” IDM senior analyst Phil Leigh told reporters, adding that users have gotten a little savvier about tweaking their software to keep themselves from easy tracing.
Not that the RIAA is really too worried. For one thing, they insist that the success of sanctioned Internet music stores like Apple’s iTunes prove the subpoena-and-sue campaign is working, with a reported 100 million songs sold as of the weekend just finished. For another, according to RIAA president Cary Sherman, more P2Pers are in for a nasty little surprise when they pull down the songs they think they want: many are actually spoof files which yield screeching sound effects rather than the actual songs, Sherman told reporters, something the industry adds to the system to try to throttle the swappers.
But if litigation doesn’t cut down on the P2P community, bugs and malware just might. Analysts have now suggested savvier file swappers are spending less time on KaZaA because the service is believed to be a way-station for adware, spyware, and even worms. KaZaA has dropped, in fact, from 5.6 million users last October to 3.8 million in June, BigChampagne said, with a number of users moving to eDonkey and iMesh, the latter based in Israel, both of which have fewer spyware and adware files and estimated faster downloads.
BigChampagne attracted attention earlier this year when it suggested that while the music business loves to beat P2P with a stick, they actually have their uses for P2P: the surveyors determined that the P2P networks the RIAA so loves to castigate are actually giving music executives an acute view of what’s clicking with music buyers.
Garland told a newspaper in March that record labels “discreetly” use his firm and others to track what’s being downloaded on the P2P services and elsewhere in cyberspace to pick which new singles to release, and what to persuade radio and MTV to play more heavily. In other words, Garland suggested, the music business is actually getting what it wants in spite of its public denunciations and lawsuits: the P2P swappers are actually helping to sell more, not less music.
