As a footnote to yesterday’s posts from the ISPA Legal Forum one of the things to have stuck in my mind is that consumers are not being consulted in any part of the discussion surrounding P2P filesharing. Whilst the inter industry argument rages we are in danger of losing out on some basic human rights.
One reply on “Consumers have no voice”
Good news Trefor: our research on digital consumer behaviour/attitudes and their impact on IP issues is being published next week by SABIP. It is preliminary, but looked at a lot of material. What is clear is that there is not enough robust data in terms of what consumers are doing – up to 10 million of them – online. When we looked at the P2P network under-pinning Pirate Bay’s search facility we found 1.3 million people sharing content. Content such as “complete series 24”; “The Wire – five series”, copies of PowerPoint, E-books, films currently in the cinema. If each person sharing when we looked downloaded one file per day that is 450 million files per year. And we interviewed plenty of people who downloaded far more than one file per day.