Been having a little discussion on Usenet over the last couple of days, and I've collected a bit of info , so I thought I'd share my findings:
First off, some numbers:
There's approximately 650 Million people making up the Internet all over the world.
18 Million of them are using Broadband, which depending who you ask or believe, may or may not include ISDN, which runs five times slower than Broadband and requires two phone lines.
The most people I've seen signed in to Kazaa is 6 million. Which means only around 1% of internet users are using the most popular filesharing software.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) are the major self-appointed guardians of online copyright, and although they both do sterling work against the pirate CD and DVD markets around the world, they have become something of a dirty word on the Internet.
The sharing of MP3 files over the Internet has been a grey area legally for some time, and the Recording industry, long known for its reluctance to embrace new technology, has taken what it sees as the moral high ground, protecting their not-really-waning profits by persecuting users of software such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
Outside of America, however - and lately, even in certain states, they have no immediate legal right to prosecute people found sharing copyrighted material online. Their only avenue at the moment is to complain about users caught sharing copyrighted material to their Internet Service Providers, in an attempt to have these users' accounts suspended.
There have been cases where they have brought cases in court, but these have been uneventful and have met with varied success. Their latest high profile case ended in faliure.
Most people will have seen or read news reports on the spreading threat of online piracy to the various entertainment industries. The future, they would have us believe, is grim. Losses to online piracy are always "predicted" or "estimated" to be in the billions of pounds.
Well as far as I can discern, the articles you'll find here and here tell a slightly different story.
The first link is to an article on the BBC website, quoting an independant report into the future income from the music industry worldwide. It predicts a quite natural 3% global drop in sales this year, with new technology and online music services adding a possible 15% to the industry's income over the next four years.
The second link is to another BBC article that quotes Hollywood Bigwig Jack Valenti, saying they know that movie downloading accounts for around 1% of all filesharing activity, that they accept that as part of the online experience and that they're not too bothered. It goes on to mention that as soon as the infrastructure is sound enough, Hollywood will be offering Movies you can watch online.
in this link, to the RIAA's recent news section shows that the focus, far from being on internet piracy, is on small operations at boot sales and church fairs. They also seem to have had a good amount of success abroad, smashing largescale pirating rings in south america and east asia.
The IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) is the RIAA's Eurpoean affiliate. It has recently puclished this report into global piracy. This report, tellingly omits data regarding online piracy. You would have thought, ifthe figures were high enough to warrant such vociferous protest in the press, that the RIAA's own report may have mentioned it. To me, it seems very telling that it was left out.
All the evidence I've seen, and some rudimentary matematics of my own leads me to the conclusion that online piracy, either of music or software really isn't the big threat the media is making it out to be.
