Are the P2P networks retiring?

After years of controversies and discussions, the music industry will get rid of its worst nightmare: the P2P download networks.

It is still uncertain if iPOD is responsible for the retirement of networks like Kazaa or BitTorrent or legal actions have started to pay off, but a study carried out by Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that usage of the paid services for downloading music has increased from 24% in 2004 to 43% this year.

Even this is good news, maybe it's not appropriate for the music industry to start celebrating yet, because the newest method users apply in order to have access to music is the direct exchange of files.

The same study shows that 27% of the American Internet users downloaded music on the Internet, but 19% transferred MP3s to another person and 28% used e-mail for accomplishing the same thing.

It seems that P2P networks are living their last days; the newest transfer methods are of user-to-user type: Mp3Player, email and even instant messaging.

Companies involved in the fight against P2P have another reason to be happy: 53% of the Internet American users consider that those who maintain the P2P networks are the only ones to blame for circulation of the pirated material.

Only 18% considered that the users are the only ones to blame and only 12% believe that both parties are guilty.

If the trend of transferring directly the files from one user to another goes on, in short time, the companies that try to stop piracy will start to regret the days when they could blame the P2P networks since in the case of the user-to -user transfer, the exchange of files is impossible to verify or controlled.