It is unknown what percentage of the music these kids share is copyrighted, but my guess would be that it is close to 100%.
Today’s mobile phones are often full featured media players, with enough space to store hundreds of songs, or several movies. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections make it easy to share these files with friends.
Matt Phillips, communications manager for the British anti-piracy organization BPI thinks this form of piracy is no real threat to the music industry yet. “While swapping songs via Bluetooth is a concern for the industry, it hasn’t caused the same problems as illegal p2p filesharing, as it’s copying on a one-to-one, rather than one-to-millions basis,” he said.
Sharing files via mobile phones has great potential. We’ve already reported on a BitTorrent client designed to run on a mobile phone. And BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen said that one of the reasons BitTorrent Inc acquired uTorrent was to port it to embedded systems on TVs, cellphones, and other non-PC platforms.