Studies: Online file sharing has increased

[Bombardier]

Online file sharing has increased

p2pnet.net News:- If a new report is correct, despite the fact that Big Music's ongoing sue 'em all campaign is failing to stop Americans from downloading music and sharing files online, its relentless victimization of people who swap music is still having an effect.

The Big Five record labels - EMI (UK), UMG (France), BMG (Germany), Sony (Japan) and Warner (US) - are suing anyone they can identify whom they claim is sharing copyrighted music files without their permission, and the FBI has recently begun acting as the labels' enforcer.

In the US, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has, on behalf of its owners, the Big Five record labels, sued 1,977 people.

Victims always settle out of court rather than risk potentially huge financial penalties if they lose to the labels' bottomless pockets and endless, highly-paid music industry legal teams, and of the 532 suits brought a while back, 432 have been 'settled'.

It would be really interesting to know how much has been garnered to date, and where the money goes.

Be that as it may, millions of people around the world - including, of course Americans who are constantly bombarded by the RIAA's disingenuous statements routinely re-issued by the mainstream media - are under the entirely false impression that Big Music is taking people to court and winning.

The number of people who share music through the p2pnetworks has actually increased from an estimated 18 million to 23 million since the Pew Internet & American Life Project's November-December 2003 survey, it says a new report.

However, it also says more than 17 million people (14%) of "online Americans" say at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they don't do it any more.

"A third of the former music downloaders, close to 6 million Internet users, say they have turned away from downloading because of the suits brought against music file-sharers by the Recording Industry Association of America.

"The retreat is particularly pronounced among online men, Internet users between the ages of 18-29, and those who have broadband connections at home.

Of Net users who have never tried to download music, 60% say the RIAA lawsuits would keep them from trying it in the future, says Pew, going on that women with Net access are more likely than online men to "say they're deterred by the law suits".

New data from comScore Media Metrix show continuing declines or stagnancy in the number of people with popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications actively running on their computers, Pew goes on.

"Since our last data memo on downloading, in which we reported comScore data gathered between November 2002 and November 2003, the KaZaa user base dropped most notably. Between November 2003 and February 2004 alone, comScore estimates that over 5 million fewer people are actively running KaZaa."

One wonders if this might be as much due Kazaa's continuing efforts to become part of the commercial music industry, turning it into a bete noir to millions of former users, as to any effect the lawsuits may be having.

This thought might be supported by Pew's statement that according to comScore data, there's been growth since last November in usage of some of the smaller file-sharing applications such as iMesh, BitTorrent, and eMule.

"The number of those who say they download music online remains well below the peak levels that we tracked in the spring of 2003, but there was some growth in those who reported music downloading in our February survey," says Pew.

In the most recent survey, 18% of Internet users said they download music files, a "modest increase from the 14% of Internet users who reported in a survey just before last Christmas that they downloaded music files online. But it is still considerably below the 29% who said they had done this when we surveyed in the spring of 2003."

Among current music downloaders, 38% say they are downloading less because of the RIAA suits. In the pre-Christmas survey, 27% said they'd throttled back because of the RIAA suits and, says the report, "That represents a significant jump in just two months."

About a third of current music downloaders say they use p2p networks. Another 24% say they swap files using email and instant messaging; 20% download files from music-related Web sites such as those run by music magazines or musician homepages.

But while online music services are "far from trumping the popularity of file-sharing networks," overall, 7% of Net users say they've bought music from them at one time or another, including 3% who currently use paid services.

Online video downloading

Some 15% of Internet users report they have downloaded video files onto their computer, up from 13% who said they had done so in our November-December survey, says Pew and, "Online men are twice as likely as women to have done this. And young adults (those ages 18 to 29) are twice as likely as older Internet users to have done this. However, as bandwidth constraints become less of an issue for users, it is likely that video downloading will become significantly more widespread."

Sharing files online

Those who say they share files from their own computer, such as music, video or picture files, or computer games rose slightly to 23% in the February 2004 survey. In our November-December 2003 survey, 20% of all Internet users said they shared files with others online.

http://p2pnet.net/story/1302

[Shawn]

:wha':

I don't believe a damn one of those polls. I'll come to my own conclusions @ the 10th of July when school is out and the networks hit their yearly peak. Fasttrack has 2.5 million running right now. It's 2:30 in the morning here. Peak hours it runs just shy of 4 million according to my count.

I don't honestly see a change, but I'll wait until July to really gauge it.

[Shawn]

BTW

You're more than welcome to use, or quote from, our stories. If you do, we'd be grateful if you'd use this code for a link back : ) Cheers! And thanks. p2pnet.net

Now that is reasonable.