P2P Population Growing Again

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck news is reporting that the file-sharing population has recovered from its mid-year plateau and is once again growing. At 9.45 million users, it is only slightly below its greatest height of 9.6 million users in August. Keep in mind however; these numbers do not represent the population of the BitTorrent community, which would surely add many millions more."

Comments

Re:Trend?

[Spazntwich]

Uh, Half Life 2 came out in November 2004.

Summer lull

[nurb432]

Thats because a lot of users are students, and most went home for the summer break.

Should see a similar reducing around the Xmas holidays and spring break.

Nothing magical here.

Excellent....

[teutonic_leech]

Good news - P2P is the thorn in the backs of music publishers that will force them to embrace legal digital distribution schemes like iTunes.

Re:Should ISP's shut down P2P filesharing?

[Bogtha]

There is a case to be made, I think, that if certain ports were disabled for home users a serious dent could be made in this P2P population -- not to mention the great deal of bandwidth freed up for more serious Internet activity.

There's a big problem with this idea: normal users don't pay their ISP for "more serious Internet activity". They pay their ISP for things like email, surfing the web, and, yes, downloading stuff from P2P networks.

If an ISP were to block P2P activity, they'd lose a hell of a lot of customers to the competition. If all the ISPs did it, that would leave a fantastic market opportunity for a startup to take their customers away from them. That's the nature of a free market - don't supply what the customers want, and somebody else is ready to take them away from you.

This is already accepted to some extent by anti-SPAM policies that forbid access to external SMTP servers, and has been used to great effect by university administrators.

That only works because the majority of users are perfectly happy using their ISP's smarthost to send mail. The same does not apply to P2P traffic.

It would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.

You're assuming that ISPs have something to gain from stopping copyright infringement. Think about it this way: if you could wave a magic wand, and make copyright infringement disappear, would that make the average user more or less likely to pay for home Internet access? And what affect would that have on ISPs' bottom lines?

ummmm

[arrrrg]

last i heard, bittorrent made up more than 1/3 of all internet traffic (not just P2P). i'm not sure what proportion of traffic is p2p in general, but bittorrent is almost certainly the biggest piece of the pie.

Re:Fucking thieves.

[bryan8m]

Obviously, most people don't think it's unethical to download music. And when the majority of society disagrees with one of its laws, that law will change. At least it should.

ethics shouldn't be dictated by the masses

[geekee]

"Obviously, most people don't think it's unethical to download music. And when the majority of society disagrees with one of its laws, that law will change. At least it should."

At one time the majority of people believed that slavery was acceptable. Ethics shouldn't be dictated by the whims of the majority, but instead on rational thought. So, if you believe there is nothing wrong with violating copyright in downloading music, justify your opinion with a reasonable explanation. Don't just say it's ok because everyone is doing it.

Re:ethics shouldn't be dictated by the masses

[imemyself]

Our government is "supposed" to be by the people, for the people, and of the people. The laws should be similar to people's opinions. If large numbers of people are breaking a law, then that "law" should absolutely not be a law. If we had reprsentitives that actually represented people, instead of companies then maybe things would be a little bit more like that now. If the representitives of the 17/1800's actually represented everyone instead of just the white males, then slavery probably wouldn't have been legal. What you are suggesting is that one person or group basically do whatever they feel is "right," irregardless of whatever the populace thinks. Terms such as dictatorship, totalitarianism, and despotism come to mind. "Rational thought" is totally subjective. Hitler thought exterminating the Jews was "rational." Evidently our President thinks spying on the public is rational. And Hilary Rosen thinks suing kids for thousands of dollars is rational.

Not the best way to word an email.

[spoco2]

That really isn't the way to word an email on such a topic to a corporation, you need to be more formal...
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To Whom it may concern,

I have noticed that you are shaping packets (*are they shaping, or are they blocking the traffic?*) which you identify as being BitTorrent traffic (http://www.bittorrent.com/). I assume your reasoning behind this is that BitTorrent traffic accounts for a very high percentage of overall bandwidth usage on your network and your assumption that all BitTorrent traffic is of an illegal nature.

However your actions are affecting many completely legitimate uses of the internet and are making your service severely crippled for many of us. For instance, the most popular online game in the world at present is World of Warcraft (WoW). This game, as most do, supply occasionaly patches and updates which require downloading of sometimes quite substantial volumes of data. BitTorrent makes this method faster for the end users (myself included), and reduces the load on the company's servers also, allowing more people to download the content in a far shorter time. Apart from this use, which is impacting me the most, there are many other items transfered using BitTorrent which are just as legal and useful to your paid subscribers.

I ask you to reconcider your blocking of this traffic, else I would like to be released from my contract to you with no penalty as you are no longer providing the service which I initially signed up for.

Sincerly,

Yournamehere!
--------------

Something along those lines anyway... (spell checked of course)... and I would lay off the legal crap... nothing will turn off a tech support or customer support officer more than some little kid (whether you are or not, that's what they'll see you as, trust me... I have run an internet provider's customer support centre) claiming that they know something about the law when really they don't... it just makes them instantly go "We've got another RIAA nut here...." "Really? Send them the pre-canned response".

Threatening to end your contract with them and demanding to be released without penalty will get you far more action than vague mentionings of cans of worms and lawsuits.

Re:Trend?

[masklinn]

That's also how I work (albeit mostly for music), P2P gives me "free tries", if i'm not interrested I delete the file and don't buy the disc period, if I like the group album I buy the CD.

And most of my friends do the same, it's a convenient way to build a collection you *really* like without having to blow your money on 90% of crap.