The IFPI announced a new round of lawsuits last May, but once again it is shown that their threats sort little effect. Pirates are not easily scared and p2p traffic continues to grow.
Ipoque studied survey anonymized date supplied by some large German network operators and concludes:
Illegal P2P file sharing has had tremendous effects on the film and music industry. Now they are struggling to curb Internet piracy. ipoque’s survey demonstrates that user behavior remains unaffected by their efforts. The massive police action initiated by the state prosecutor’s office of Cologne, Germany, supported by the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) caused a short-term decrease of P2P downloads of 15%. In the course of only three weeks, download volume bounced back to its previous level.
And the future?
ipoque predicts that such massive legal actions will not significantly change the overall amount of illegal downloads. It will only drive users to new, more elusive file sharing platforms
A while ago we already reported about the ineffectiveness of p2p raids.
On February 21 The Belgian police managed to shut down Razorback2’s servers. Razorback2 was considered to be the heart of the Edonkey2000 network, with over a million users. However, Cachelogic’s Vice President David Ferguson concluded from their traffic statistics on the Edonkey2000 network that it had NO EFFECT on Edonkey’s traffic. It just relocated the problem.
