Sales will continue to diminish, because of the economic climate, because the media industry’s gaining a reputation for its contempt of public opinion and rights, and because that’s to be expected when selling shit music through an obsolete business model. The outcome would be the use of Tor, P2P, VPNs and proxies becoming mainstream.Īnother outcome, this one from media industry lobbying, is mainstream ‘artists’ would only get exposure through official sources. Majority of people access pornography at least occasionally, and they’ll find ways of doing that without adding their names to the proposed opt-in list. One thing to watch is the government’s plan for some pornography opt-in system. The move was requested by a handful of lobbyists against the wishes on the majority of Internet users. The high court’s recent order to ISPs for bloking The Pirate Bay seems a deeply unpopular move, judging by the comments across a number of sites that covered the news, including The Guardian and Sophos Security. The number of people using P2P and VPNs is also rapidly increasing.
By January 2015, it’s expected to number 35,000 (UK & US) users, and around 20,000 users during normal periods. As it stands, peak usage grows by roughly 5,000 users each year. I’ve rescaled the graph and attempted to draw best fit lines across the peak and average usage trends in order to make some projections for 2015.
In the next couple of months, the metrics could reveal a massive spike attributable to the blocking of The Pirate Bay. So, my theory is the peaks in network usage were associated with file sharing, or more accurately they were a response to news reports about SOPA, ACTA, MegaUpload, Fileserve, censorship, etc. The next biggest occured late November 2011, again in the UK and the US, around the same time the unaccountable and not very transparent Internet Watch Foundation got Fileserve blocked, according to the EFF Deeplinks blog. Another survey claims the usage of a certain P2P network also doubled around this time.
More specifically, the timing suggests a relationship to the Stop Online Piracy Act or the MegaUpload takedown. The largest spike in activity occurs in early January 2012, and this appears in the graphs for the UK and the US, suggesting a response to an event common to both countries, rather than a regional political thing. Basically the global stats reveal an increase of approximately 270,000 users since January 2010, and there are huge spikes in network usage every few months, lasting 1-3 days, from the United Kingdom and the United States. While researching stuff for a presentation I’m doing this week on a related topic, I happened across usage statistics for the Tor network, from which I made a few speculations.
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