Folks when asked most people will tell you they heard about file-sharing from a news article or a magazine piece that they or a friend read, often the topic is how "the elite anti-piracy forces battle the evil copyright criminals" etc *yawn* I think you know the BS, the resulting publicity often has the opposite effect with the ludicrously staged "takedown"efforts
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080417-bittorrent-use-soars-as-mpaa-fights-on-against-p2p-sites.htmlThe downside to high-profile actions against P2P sites is that they act as free publicity. The Pirate Bay bragged that after a Danish ISP was forced to block its subscribers from accessing the Swedish site, traffic spiked. TPB attributes the increase from the publicity surrounding the ISP's action. Malcolm concedes that there may be a cause-and-effect situation at play, but says that it's unavoidable. "Look, I don't think there's any question that some of the public may not be aware of these sites and there's going to be curiosity. Some people end up staying there" he said. "The alternative is to do nothing and hope that they don't discover The Pirate Bays of the world, and that's not realistic."
Unfortunately, people are discovering The Pirate Bay and a whole host of other sites. Even as the MPA, MPAA, IFPI, and other groups have scored legal victories over torrent sites, BitTorrent use is growing. In fact, average BitTorrent traffic for the two-month period from mid-January to mid-March was up almost 25 percent compared with the month before Christmas, according to online media measurement firm BigChampagne.
The report indicates P2P net populations are at a comfortably saturated state with the ISP's pet hate Bit Torrent still continuing to gain users at a faster rate than expected, are the MPAA/RIAA really to blame for this shot in the foot ?
Many think so, a warning to one guy is an advertisement to the next.
