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20% increase in P2P downloads since Pirate Bay court case.

At the ISPA Legal Forum today it was stated that research has shown that illegal P2P downloading has increased by 20% since the high profile Pirate Bay court case.

This was revealed as the result of a recent 3 month research study into Consumer online behaviour by University College London academic Robin Hunt. Hunt said that a snapshot of Bit Torrent activity indicated that there were 1.3 million sharing sessions online – up 20% from before the litigation.

He also stated that in a breakfast meeting yesterday with David Lammy, the IP Minister had estimated that there were 10 million people in the UK involved with illegal P2P downloading.  The scale of this is such that if 10 million people are breaking the law then “there is something wrong with the law” said Hunt.

The prospect of criminalising 10m people is clearly unimaginable.

Other snippets from the Forum suggested that since YouTube had stopped rights holders such as Warner Brothers from posting videos to the site there had been a growth in kids uploading videos made from their own local copies.  This has lead to unknown teenagers getting a huge number of hits.

What’s more with the plummeting cost of storage – £150 can now get you a Terrabyte hard drive – it won’t be long before the whole iTunes back catalogue can be stored on a single PC. It is estimated that 10 Terrabyte hard drives will be available within two years.

This problem seems to me to be about to come to a head as we await the Digital Britain Final Report.