File Hosting Services Vs. BitTorent: Which One Will Rule File Sharing?
The fight is on: file-hosting sites vs P2P networks
While earlier this year we reported about the level of uncertainty when it comes to sites like RapidShare with respect to the protection they offer to their users, their popularity hasn’t suffered since then – on the contrary, with torrent sites being intensively targeted, RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile enjoyed a massive growth in number of those looking to download pirated movies, music, games, apps or other (not that they, themselves, have been safe from legal trouble).
This popularity is obvious if you consider the Alexa ranking for RapidShare – 17. Moreover, German networking vendor Ipoque point it as being accountable for 5% of all Internet traffic globally! Now, that’s huge! Also, the site told The New York Times a few months back that it hosted 10 petabytes of data and up to 3 million downloaders at a time.
Vic DeMarines, vice president of products at anti-piracy software vendor V.I. Labs, emphasized the ease of use of such services which facilitate copyright infringement – "It's incredibly easy to use. And what you get is essentially your own private FTP server."
According to ComputerWorld, The Association of American Publishers claims that half of the eBooks downloaded illegally which its members discovered were linked to Rapidshare. A recent survey conducted by V.I. Labs regarding the availability of pirated software from a sample of 43 vendors, accounted RapidShare for 100%. The site, however, complies with the Safe Harbor Provisions of the U.S.' Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by promptly removing pirated files when copyright owners notify them (some organizations are even given the permission to directly remove the hyperlinks and unauthorized content themselves).
Despite this huge popularity RapidShare and similar services have, the undefeated champion of illegal distribution of files over the Internet remain, as expected, P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. ComputerWorld quoted Ipoque saying it accounts for between 43% to 70% of illegal file sharing, depending on the region of the world.
According to V.I. Labs, BitTorrent is still ahead of the game with 6 out of 10 P2P fans using it to grab what they want from the Web.
In second spot comes eDonkey (at a fair distance, though) with 20% share, despite hosting around 900,000 users and 77 million files. To complete the trio, Gnutella has settled on the third position, leaving behind the days when it was #1.
Further on, DeMarines predicted that file-hosting sites will eventually dethrone P2P: "P2P is on its way down. They're too visible, and so the copyright organizations are going to take these BitTorrent tracker sites out."
I guess many have already placed their bet on one of these hugely popular methods of file sharing and it remains to be seen if indeed the crown can be taken away from P2P networking. Due to the much social aspect it involves, I’d say not to expect it to soon. But then again…there’s a bit of self-sufficiency in our society today and the Internet does sometimes have this tendency of secluding you…doesn’t it?
