Internet downloads booming
13 July 2004
Internet users download twice as many films, games and music as they did a year ago, despite a big crackdown on the activity, a new survey claims.
Research conducted by Cambridge technology firm CacheLogic found that illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has continued to rise, despite industry attempts to crack down on abuses and introduce legal alternatives.
The CacheLogic report reveals that an estimated 10 million users are logged onto the major P2P networks at any one point in time, sharing over 10,000,000 gigabytes worth of data. Each day, the equivalent of roughly three billion songs or five million movies zip between computers.
Record companies in the US have taken prolific song-swappers to court in a bid to halt the increasingly popular use of illegal P2P sites, but the study suggests that the launch of legal download sites and attempts to crack down on illegal swapping have done little to curb the craze.
"One of the biggest myths put forth by the music industry -- that they are winning the war on file-sharing -- is simply wrong," said Andrew Parker, co-founder of CacheLogic. "It's a case of displacement. Users are just moving to new networks."
CacheLogic discovered that BitTorrent was the most popular P2P protocol worldwide, consuming significantly more network resources than other network applications, such as KaZaA or eDonkey.
The survey also states that a vast majority of P2P traffic volumes now results from large files such as movies, software and games rather than smaller MP3 music files, with the typical file size greater than 100Mb per file transfer.
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