From the research that we have been doing at Perceptric we have discovered some things that are largely not understood by the content industry as far as we know.

One of these things relates to the dayparting of download activity. (Wikipedia provides the following definition: “In broadcasting, dayparting is the practice of dividing the day into several parts, during each of which a different type of radio programming or television programming apropos for that time is aired. Programs are most often geared toward a particular demographic, and what the target audience typically engages in at that time”).

We thought that if the data on P2P activity that is commonly accepted was correct – i.e. that more than 70% of the bandwidth that is being used globally was for P2P activity – then it would be statistically impossible for all that to take place during the time that people are commonly at home.

So we started investigating what times downloads take place.

What we found was that there are very distinct time zones during which activity is heightened, some of which are during normal office hours, Monday to Friday.

This has some interesting sociological implications which we are looking at in conjunction with some colleagues one of whom is an industrial psychologist and the other who is a neural anthropologist. The conclusions from those discussions will be released in a forthcoming report that we intend to publish.

That is somewhat academic.

What is important here though is that there has been an ongoing media demonization of the use of P2P by ordinary individuals for several years. It appears to have started in the US and has spread through most of the English speaking world (the colonies of the US Empire, perhaps?). What has been ignored is the part that corporations wittingly or unwittingly play in the sharing of files using P2P.

Most corporations will of course deny the possibility of there being any illicit activity taking place through the corporate firewalls. And for many of them that is probably quite true. But for some it isn’t. In fact for some the P2P activity that is taking place is happening totally behind the firewall with employees from within the organization sharing files from central servers that are there to – no pun intended – better serve the employees!

If smart executives in the music and movie industry actually did some real analysis of the data instead of buying into the rhetoric coming out of a few people in Hollywood, who have their own agendas, they might actually get somewhere.

Personally I would hope that the “somewhere” they get to is a realization that they are never going to stop file sharing taking place period. The only thing that they can do is to start realizing that the people at the top who have been pushing that agenda are wrong. And it is only going to change when some of the insightful people within the industry remove the blinkers and understand what the entire picture looks like. Then they can change their own minds. Once that happens hopefully P2P will be embraced rather than demonized and society will be able to benefit universally from the free flow of information travelling in a optimal technical environment.