File-sharing thrives amid new outlets

Internet users download twice as many films, games and music as they did a year ago, despite a big crackdown on the activity, according to a study on Tuesday.

Better broadband Internet connections and compression technologies mean larger files can be downloaded more rapidly, creating as big a piracy headache for movie studios as for music labels.

Each day, the equivalent of roughly three billion songs or five million movies zips between computers, according to the study by Cambridge, England-based technology firm CacheLogic.

It estimates Internet users around the globe freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes — or 10 million gigabytes — of data, much of it in the form of copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video games.

The rogue exchanges continue to dwarf the nascent market for legitimate music downloads ushered in by the likes of Apple Computer's iTunes.

The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest Internet service providers $10 million per year each in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic said.

Who's winning the war?
In the light of its findings, the company also questioned the wisdom of the music industry's crackdown on file-sharers.

"One of the biggest myths put forth by the music industry -- that they are winning the war on file-sharing -- is simply wrong," said Andrew Parker, co-founder of CacheLogic.

"It's a case of displacement," he added. "Users are just moving to new networks."

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Music industry trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) defended the legal strategy, saying its own research shows the number of illicit music files on the Internet dipped by 100 million between January and June.

"It hasn't been dramatic, but the number of infringing files has fallen from 900 million to 800 million," an IFPI spokesman said, adding the rise in volume cited by CacheLogic may be down to the increase in film and spoofed song files now online.

When the music industry began suing the most prolific song-swappers last September, a number of them switched from the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa to a host of upstarts to shake off the dragnet.

Today, the likes of Bit Torrent and eDonkey have become the P2P networks of choice, particularly for European and Asian file-sharers, CacheLogic said.

The face of file-sharing has changed too. The vast majority of files passing through P2P networks now exceeds 100 megabytes, meaning Internet users are as likely to download larger movie, software and game files as they are the smaller song files.

"It's all about video now," Parker said.