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General P2P > Pirates to be strung up! (but probably not)
Pirates to be strung up! (but probably not)
Being many, many timezones away from Stockholm (and having been woefully behind in blogging in general) makes anything I have to say about the guilty verdict for the Piratebay admins rather old news, but I will just reiterate my previous prediction that nothing substantive will change in the P2P or filesharing world. Â Most likely appeals will prevent any change from affecting Piratebay itself for quite some time, but even if that proves mistaken, there is roughly zero chance that if the Piratebay disappears it would reduce the amount of Bittorrent traffic worldwide, much less decrease the amount of copyright infringement that occurs on the Internet. Â Just as with previous rightsholder victories (Napster, Suprnova, Isotorrent, etc.) there will likely be evolution in the way people share files, making whatever the next mainstream avenue of piracy (usenet, directdownload, etc.) that much harder for enforcement to have any real impact.
For some other interesting analyses of the verdict, go here and here.
The other recent attention-grabbing news is the decision by TimeWarner to
back off from their initial attempt to expand their experiment in broadband caps. The Piratebay trial and the TimeWarner decision may not appear to be connected at first, but in my opinion, they actually are more related than appears at first glance. Â It is a little admitted fact that P2P is one of the “killer apps” for broadband, and while I don’t think people would revert back to dial-up without access to bittorrent, I do believe there is a great deal of interest in broadband throttling, caps, and metered usage because so many users do, on occasion, fileshare. Â The broadband ISP’s own statistics may point to a relative few users dominating traffic usage, but I suspect there are far more users who may not be downloading ripped Blu-Ray discs constantly, but still prefer to have the ability to get a TV show, album, or DVD rip every so often. Â My prediction is that ISPs are going to face much more resistance to any moves that smack users of caps or throttling and P2P will be one of the reasons.
Categories: General P2P Tags: bay, broadband, cable, cap, cuban, mpaa, pirate, piratebay, tier, time, trial, warner
