oct 04 – Donkey kicks Kazaa

Yet more evidence that Kazaa – once the undispute champion of filesharing – is fast falling down the ranks. P2P monitoring firm BayTSP has released a report showing that eDonkey has now taken over from Kazaa as the biggest filesharing network, with an average of 2.5 million users online every day compared to 2.4 million per day on Kazaa. Interestingly, however, the average number of files shared by each user has increased markedly on both Kazaa and eDonkey this year – indicating that the RIAA lawsuits are starting to lose some of their menace for many p2p users and contradicting the BPI’s recent case for action. At the same time movies are beginning to be the big attraction for many downloaders, which has boosted the rise of networks like eDonkey and BitTorrent which are better equipped for the sharing of large files than even Kazaa. Unfortunately for copyright owners, BitTorrent’s unique design (dependent upon “torrent links” rather than a central search engine) means that it is harder to monitor or spoof than other p2p systems.

Advertisement