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1.6 Million PCs Track Popular P2P Clients
Hodejo1 writes "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all. Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News joined forces to analyze 1,661,688 PCs to track 152 unique P2P clients quarterly from September 2006 to September 2007. The result is a definitive list of the most popular P2P software in use. Topping the list by a healthy margin is LimeWire. 'In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month. With regards to market share — counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems — LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%'. Meanwhile, uTorrent has made huge gains during this period soaring into second place and posing a genuine challenge to LimeWire."
I am a high schooler still, and as such am in contact with many high schoolers. Most of the kids that file share simply don't want to bother understanding the simple concepts of a client versus a tracker. The fact that you can't just open a torrent client window and automatically start downloading is a real turn off. It's sort of crazy that kids will go out of their way to find new cgi proxies daily to circumvent filters at school, but don't have the will to do a web search for a torrent and use a client to download them.
There is no real difference in simplicity between limewire and torrent, but there is a major one in perception. Kids see these boxes with "ports" that they have to configure and test, and they just lose all interest interpreting that there is some deep knowledge of computers required. They completely disregard the fact that limewire is less safe and that the community surrounding torrent is much more cooperative and helpful. It's really weird. I can't explain it other than kids are only interested in "cool" stuff that requires no effort, or what they perceive to be no effort.
If you can't parse it already, I'll just go ahead and say that, yes I do have trouble relating to my peers sometimes.
I got a catholic block.
The best news is to find out that your own P2P app isn't even listed. That might put you below the litigation radar threshold.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did she mention that there are a whole army of grandmothers out there trading copyrighted sewing machine embroidery patterns by e-mail? Disney has in fact busted a few of them from time to time.
My ex-mother-in law collected 500+ 3 1/2" floppies full of designs before we bought her a CD burner. No-one has enough grandhildren to use that many designs!
Three Squirrels