Bittorrent users vow to go underground

Survey reveals 41% would just hide their sharing if warned

23 June 2009 13:17 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Filesharing news site Torrentfreak has announced the results of a poll that suggests that 41% of P2P users would "take steps to hide their identity" if they received a warning letter from an ISP.

38% said they'd ignore the warning, but carry on with more caution, and only 7% said they'd stop sharing. The remaining 14% said they'd carry on regardless. Nearly 19,000 users responded to the survey.

The results of this web poll suggests two things. Firstly, if you want to make money, start running an anonymity service for filesharers. Secondly, the effort that the content companies are putting into lobbying the government to force ISPs to warn their customers might be misplaced.

Industry analysts have suggested that the best way to combat piracy is to provide a better, safer experience, and as good a catalogue as provided by illicit services. At the time of writing, the latter of those two goals remains elusive, thanks to the nightmare of licensing that any digital music service has to go through.

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