When the RIAA began its lawsuit campaign on June 26, 2003, something very interesting happened. Based solely on the stats that Slyck gathers, it was observed that the RIAA did have some brief sucess against the P2P community. FastTrack numbers were down, and other networks appeared to stagnate. However after a few months, other networks began to excel where FastTrack left off.

Led by networks such as eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent, the P2P community managed to actually grow despite the RIAA's lawsuits. A new study into the P2P community conducted by researchers from UC Riverside and CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) have yielded results that many have already known; P2P is alive, well and growing stronger.

But Slyck, the RIAA is saying they have achived a glorious victory against file-sharing, and that my P2P days are numbered!

If you are a FastTrack user, this very well may be true. However, according to the research conducted by UC Riverside and CAIDA, this is the extent of the RIAA's success. According to the research paper, "FastTrack portion of P2P traffic as dropped in agreement with media reports." However, P2P users have simply switched over to newer, more advanced networks such as BitTorrent or eDonkey2000 rather than drop file-sharing all together.

But Slyck, we have heard similar research results before, what makes this one so different?

Good question. Back in the day, monitoring P2P traffic was easy. Older P2P networks used established ports. Today's P2P applications are much different and use arbitrary ports to hide file-sharing activity. UC Riverside and CAIDA took this into consideration when they conducted their 2 year study.

The group colleted data at two different links of Tier 1 Internet Service Providers (commonly known as Backbones.) Now, the group admits it is very difficult to measure P2P traffic these days considering the extent developers go to hide their traffic. However, P2P packets do have certain signatures that more often than not can be identified as P2P traffic. Noting that being precise in this matter is nearly impossible, the groups aims to "affirm or refute claims on the trends of file-sharing over the last two years."

But Slyck, I do not understand anything from this research paper, give me the bottom line please!

The bottom line from their research is that P2P traffic is at least comparable to last years levels. The group also points out the strong probability that traffic has indeed increased. In addition, the group footnotes two other studies where P2P traffic has increased over the same time period.

Hey Slyck, what does this mean for me?

This means that, like the researchers so keenly noted, P2P is here to stay. The researchers also noted that P2P is now entering its second golden age. Remember the near collapse of P2P when Napster was destroyed, then the subsequent resurrection under the flag of distributed networks? We are living in a similar age, except instead of distributing the community; P2P networks are now hiding their very existence. While things became shaky after the RIAA began its lawsuit campaign, file-sharing is now in full recovery.

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BitTorrent :: BitTorrent Clients

You can read the research paper here.

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