HOW GOES THE RIAA BATTLE?

Again, we wonder, how long before the shareholders in the record companies start to ask questions about how much money is being redirected from their pension companies into a fruitless battle against peer to peer networks. By now, the RIAA and its client organisations around the world must have spent millions on the war on filesharing, and what effect is it having? None, according to a study by Sandvine:

“upstream P2P traffic represents up to 85 percent of all bandwidth consumed on broadband provider networks in Europe while downstream traffic represents about 60% of all bandwidth consumed. File-sharing in the UKand North America consume about 48 percent of total bandwidth on the downstream and 76 percent on the upstream.”

Actually, not quite "none" - Mike Goodman from Yankee Group reports that every time the RIAA issues a new flurry of lawsuits, it actually stimulates growth in filesharing:

“Every time they have a press release or there's news about it, the number of P2P users grows,” Yankee Group Senior analyst Mike Goodman recently told TechNewsWorld. Statistics seem to agree. Monthly P2P traffic has almost tripled worldwide since the RIAA began initiating individual lawsuits in 2003. And the latest stab against operators could further that, part of what Goodman calls “the P2P marketing campaign.”

GartnerG2 research director Mike McGuire voiced it another way. “It seems to be like trying to manage Jell-O,” he said, referring to the formless, expanding blob known as file-sharing. From the perspective of the RIAA, the latest salvo is designed to eliminate some of the top services and entrepreneurs from the game, while also discouraging new entrants. But users are notorious for jumping from one service to another, opening the door to new entrants all of the time. "It doesn't go away, it just shifts, and every time it shifts, it gets bigger," noted Goodman.

In other words: the RIAA is driving traffic to filesharing networks, not away from it.

Is your pension fund being invested in these geniuses?

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