Prologue Fairy Story.....

Imagine how you would feel after spending a fortune in election fees, lobbying fees, legal fees, private eye investigator fees, advertising and in the process of doing so, accidently giving your stated enemy, the key to Fort Knox, a free pass to remove as much loot as they liked and too boot, the mindset of all of your customers so that the customers would want to carry all the gold away to be deposited in the pirate coves secret enemy stronghold, the infamous, tri-homed, impregnable EPG.

But if you were the Content Industry, you would feel like you had won a great victory when the Swedish Government this week finally passed the anti-piracy legislation.

And Internet traffic in Sweden Plunged 30% downwards overnight.

File sharing in the USA was “outlawed” with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (DMCA).

Yet in the United States last night between 10:00 pm and 12 pm east coast time – there were approximately 38.7 million (visible) people sharing approximately 4.3 Terrabytes of data and transferring between themselves, approximately 300 megabytes per user.

Just how much data is that in terms of total backbone traffic.

11610000000 megabytes (MB)

11337890.62500 gigabytes (GB)

11072.158813 terabytes (TB) or – 16196000  movies.

Please remember, this is over a two hour time period with half of the east coast of the USA already in bed asleep.

There have been various attempts at measuring Internet Growth and P2P traffic as a component of Internet Growth – yet no-one has yet done a chart of the two together.

We thought we would have a go.

So will the legislation make any difference to the Swedes ? I doubt it.

Especially when the latest offering from the Pirate Bay is total anonymity, total invisibility (and obviously total immunity to prosecution) for the lowly sum of only five euros per month.

Assuming everyone in the world wants to be impervious to prosecution (sign-up here) then we can calculate five Euros per month times 23 million peers. I make that around $(USD)200,000,000 estimated revenue for the Pirate Bay boys next year.

And that’s not payment for content – that’s payment for the “mechanism of delivery” and as I said the other day – the US Supreme court has found that a mechanism in itself if capable of being used for legal activities as well as illegal, is not a breach of the DMCA.

Lets think about that.

Regardless of the outcome of the current court case, the Pirate Bay have developed an intensely loyal following.

Past efforts at de-knackering the Pirate Bay have proved fruitless,

Their revenue from the new delivery model will challenge Apple Ipods within two years and shut down iTunes within five.

Isn’t it time that the industry offered to buy the Pirate Bay or at the very least learnt to work with them?

Haven’t they learnt that every push actually costs them more ?

I like watching new movies and would like to make sure that Hollywood can afford to keep on making them. And so, whilst I disagree with some of their modus operandi tactics, haven’t they learnt yet that sometimes a leopard just has to scrub off its spots ……… no matter how much “face” it loses………before everyone VANISHES

References

Andrew Odlyzko; Measurements and Mismeasurements and the Dynamics of Data Traffic Growth (2002);l http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/talks/cmg-mismeasurements.ppt

Stephen McClelland; International backbone traffic growth 'nigh unstoppable'; http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/Print.asp?Id=AR_3861 14/Jan/2008

*Bin Fan anors; Stochastic Differential Equation Approach to Model BitTorrent-like P2P Systems

Dept. of Computer Science & Eng. The Chinese University of Hong Kong

http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/PUBLICATION/ICC_2006.pdf

International Telecommunications Union Measuring the Information Society. The ICT Development Index 2009 http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/material/IDI2009_w5.pdf

Colin Richardson Australia's Peak Demand for Internet Bandwidth

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/teloz/reports/richardson.pdf

Whirlpool Internet Stats 2003-2008