IPRED's Effect 2 Weeks In: Traffic Still Down, Music Sales Up

I wrote earlier that Internet traffic dropped after Sweden's IPRED law, designed to give copyright holders the ability to force ISPs to reveal details of users sharing files. Traffic dropped fairly precipitously, but while some felt the traffic would bounce back, it hasn't. On the other hand, sales of music have climbed.

The 33% drop in traffic was noted by Christian Engstrom, vice-chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party said while the drop was a direct result of the law coming into effect, he felt that the reduction would be temporary.

However, Royal Pingdom emailed me earlier this week, and if traffic is going to recover, it'll be later, rather than sooner.

You can see from the graphic above that traffic has remained flat since IPRED went into effect (BTW, I've wondered why Apple hasn't sued; surely someone could confuse IPRED with iPod). At the same time, according to Royal Pingdom, both video and music sales are up.

“Our sales have increased steadily since the first of April. However this coincides with a number of campaigns on our part and so it is quite impossible to determine the cause of the sales increase just yet,” says Magnus Aurell, Marketing Manager at SF Anytime. Asked whether he believes SF Anytime will benefit from the IPRED legislation, he adds:

“Absolutely, we do hope the law will have a positive effect for us.”

However, much like Engstrom, Daniel Westman, a researcher in Law and Information Technology at Stockholm University said:

“This is just a temporary drop, similar to phenomena during industry initiatives with a lot of media coverage before. There will have to be convictions in the courts for a lasting drop in file sharing, and even then many file sharers are likely to migrate to technologies where evidence is very difficult to get.”

The Pirate Bay has already had more than 100,000 people pre-register for its IPREDator VPN service. IPREDator is a direct response to IPRED; it will store no logs so copyright holders will be unable to get information on downloaders.

Of course, the founders of The Pirate Bay were just found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement; while the IPREDator site says the service will go live on Wednesday, that verdict might just slow things down.