Kids use their Phones to Share Music
A recent survey amongst 1500 British kids between the age of 8 and 13 shows that 33% of them share music via their mobile phones. 45% of the kids that did not share, would like to do this in the near future.
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.
