A new Internet traffic trends report released by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that global P2P traffic is expanding, with BitTorrent as the key player. In North America, more than half of all upstream traffic (53.3%) on an average day can be attributed to P2P. The report further signals some really interesting regional differences in P2P use, such as the dominance of Ares in Latin America.
The Chinese government has stepped in and banned 10 video sites, while giving warnings to 17 others. The sites were accused of ‘regulations violations’ ranging from running a service without authorization, through to displaying violent or horrific content. None of the charges relate to piracy, even though one of the sites is China’s biggest eDonkey indexing site.
A court has ruled that a site providing links to P2P downloads is operating legally. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games does not break the law. The court’s decision is final and cannot be appealed.
Having failed to encourage massive punishment against the administrator of eDonkey link site ‘ShareConnector’ in a criminal trial, anti-piracy outfit BREIN has once more resorted to traditional bully tactics – by turning up on his doorstep and threatening him, face to face.
A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise and responsible for 50-75% of all P2P traffic and roughly 40% of all Internet traffic.
It’s normal these days for anti-piracy companies to target P2P protocols and applications such as BitTorrent, LimeWire and eDonkey. Targeting the newsgroups or Usenet is fairly unusual but add that to the fact that one particular company isn’t going after pirates but the original content purchaser, this approach seems relatively unique.
In March we reported on an anti-piracy outfit and its legal partners taking action against UK file-sharers, having already done so against thousands in Germany. Now, thousands of Italian file-sharers have been issued with demands totaling over one million euros. The cost of sharing a single song in Italy? A cool 300 Euros.
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Peter Sunde Left Quote
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