I was involved in email listserver discussion about peering restrictions in Australia recentely and one of the querants whom I’ll call SL asked me if the Swedish Peering model had a positive impact on the countries economy.

My answer was complex but essentially a few weeks ago we rated 172 country’s around the world from poorest to richest in our story “How the Content Industry Won the West”

Today we will utilize only the countries reported on by the OECD in full and compare the OECD Real GDP data data with that from the International Property Rights Index (IPRI) 2009 report; a report which in their own words:

“is an international comparative study that measures the significance of both physical and intellectual property rights and their protection for economic well-being. In order to incorporate and grasp the important aspects related to property rights protection, the Index focuses on three areas: Legal and Political Environment (LP), Physical Property Rights (PPR), and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The current study analyzes data for 115 countries around the globe, representing ninety-six percent of world GDP. Of great importance, the 2009 gauge incorporates data of PR protection from various sources, often directly obtained from expert surveys within the evaluated countries. “

I call this analysis the P2P/GDP Ratio.
There appears to be a direct correlation with the speed of a Country’s Real GDP acceleration and the quantity of file sharing.
 

Source: GDP – 2483806 Annex Table 1.  Real GDP
Source 2: http://www.internationalpropertyrightsindex.org Copyright Piracy Classification for each Country

Notwithstanding that in the writers opinion they have understated dramatically the amount of P2P actually occurring within a number of countries, for example within Australia, the latest Whirlpool Internet Report (http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2008/) shows that 53% of Australians utilise file sharing software. However, IPRI calculates that the current police actions (AFACTS –v- iiNet) and the 2006-2008 legislative amendments to the copyright act make Australia one of the good guys in the eyes of the anti-piracy group that funded the IPRI report.

Perceptric statistics, collected since 2005 demonstrate that the IPRI numbers do not accurately reference the amount of file sharing accurately occurring.

Another way of looking at the data is comparing the volume of P2P to the IPRI rating for the country. It would appear that  generally, the higher the IPRI rating - the lower the P2P file sharing AND the lower the GDP accelerated growth


Whilst this blog posting is only an interim superficial look at the real value of global file sharing, the Perceptric P2P report due out at the end of March takes a closer look at the beneficial results of file sharing on the global economy.