A US techie firm reckons that people are downloading twice as many music, games and films than they did a year ago. The study by CacheLogic, who make systems for ISPs to manage P2P traffic, reckon some 3 billion songs and 5 million movies are swapped around the world each day. That, the company argue, is costing ISPs $10 million a day in bandwidth maintenance - meaning internet companies who turned a blind eye to file sharing because it encouraged people to buy broadband may want to put limitations on it very soon.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, who used to love stories of how bad P2P file sharing was, were keen to stress their research showed music downloading was down following the legal action taken by the RIAA, IFPI and other music industry bodies around the world. To be fair to them, it is in CacheLogic's interest to show P2P file sharing is up given that they make software that manages it!