We have observed an interesting change of user behavior in peer-to-peer file sharing networks after the unexpected death of the legendary King of Pop Michael Jackson on June 25.

Our diagram shows the download behavior in popular P2P networks in Germany of Michael Jackson's discography (red line) and albums (all other lines) starting from July 1 until August 24. The data are normalized to a maximum number of file transfers.

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Since the successful days of Napster, file sharing of copyright-protected material — particularly in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks — has been a serious threat to the established business models of the content industry. There have been numerous discussions about the real impact. Scientific papers show the whole range from negative to positive effects, or no effects at all. In my opinion, there are effects, indeed. Some of them are positive as file sharing can expose new music groups and authors to an audience. And some effects are negative as existing copyrights are definitely infringed to a huge extent in the net.

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Admittedly, “X percent of the Internet is P2P” makes for a great headline and is an effective way to generate publicity. It would be dishonest to deny this was the reason ipoque started its Internet studies in 2006. It is, at the same time, a great opportunity to demonstrate the own capabilities. If the equipment can detect and measure it, it is able to control it. Other equipment vendors have released similar studies, and analyst companies even try to make money with such studies. In the past two months only, three Internet studies with a particular focus on P2P traffic have been published, and ipoque’s Internet Study 2008 will be released by the end of the year.

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Technically, the latest encryption and obfuscation enhancements of BitTorrent, the currently most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network, deserve respect. They come in the form of extensions to certain BitTorrent clients such as Vuze and BitComet, and they make life for deep packet inspection (DPI) vendors like us more difficult. Detection signatures have become more complex thus requiring more processing power.

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