P2P-Zone - Welcome to the 8% club

nice post omb!

it may be small percentage wise, but relative or not, 8% is huge in real numbers. if apx 40 million households have at least one file, and a household is defined as three people, that's 120 million file sharers in the us alone, and that number is more inline with my own estimates of 100 million, and way more than the usual number of 60 million users bandied about in the media.

8 % of 120 million is apx 10 million people.

that the npd uses their own survey to justify the riaa's lawsuit campaign makes less and less sense - not more - with user bases this large -

"The RIAA's focus on those sharing the most files makes sense, because this group provides the most egregious example of one of the music industry's most pressing business issues -- copyright infringement."

as harddrive capacities skyrocket and prices continue to plunge, soon everyone, not just the 10 million users now ahead of the wave will have the space and the ability to create – and fill - their own celestial jukeboxes. don’t expect them to fill 10,000 song 20 gig ipods at 99 cents a song, it won’t happen. when capacities hit a terabyte sometime in the next 18 months you’ll need $120,000 bucks to load a computer with drm encapsulated tunes and that’s clearly out of the question, not when hooking up two drives together will copy the contents in minutes for free and transferring that much content over a fast p2p network could take 5 months.

at this point in their history the riaa and increasingly the mpaa should think long and hard about chasing users off p2p networks at all. not when speeds, price and capacities make it more and more attractive to synch harddrives. drive cloning in the multi-terabyte leagues might be their worst nightmare yet.

i’m increasingly of a mind that direct, person-to-person swapping will be the next huge wave, at least until bandwidth catches up to capacity, and the way things are going that will be a long time from now. it’s been estimated that soon, very soon, the average personal computer will have enough room to store every single song ever recorded, plus every book and a few thousand movies too. within weeks of that happening everyone will have everything everyone else has and there will be no turning back.

- js.