While the RIAA may think that filing lawsuits against individuals and sending companies threatening letters significantly reduces P2P usage, a survey of 300 people in public and private companies mostly in North America shows that a third still use file sharing networks at work. The survey was conducted by the security provider Blue Coat Systems.
42% of the people surveyed continue to use file sharing applications at home and 60% have no fear of being sued by the RIAA or getting into trouble with using their companies' network for file sharing.
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Security provider Blue Coat Systems, who conducted the survey, said that 42 percent of the 300 respondents continued to use file sharing applications like Kazaa and networks like Gnutella at home. More than 38.6 per cent said they do their file swapping on company networks on someone else's time. The survey said that nearly 70 per cent of the peer-to-peer application users said they spend more than 16 minutes a day sharing files and close to 16 per cent said they spend more than one hour a day doing so. Almost 60 per cent didn't worry about being sued by the RIAA or getting their bosses into hot water by using the network. The survey respondents, contacted via e-mail from e-mail lists of Internet users, work at a range of public and private companies, with most located in North America. The only downside to the validity of the survey is Blue Coat peddles hardware that companies can use to control file sharing and other Web activities on their corporate networks. |
From what I can see, if the number of lawsuits filed is compared with the population in the US, chances are that one will win a draw for an expensive prise before they get sued for illegal file sharing. Then again, the risk of sharing significantly rises as the user shares out more copyrighted files. It would be interesting if this survey had also queried if the user shares out 10 or more files and 100 or more files to see what percentage of each returns positive.
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Source: The Inquirer
