»P2p booms: File Sharing doubled within 1 year«

Internet users download twice as many films, games and music as they did a year ago, despite a big crackdown on the activity, according to a study.

Better broadband Internet connections and compression technologies mean larger files can be downloaded more rapidly, creating as big a piracy headache for movie studios as for music labels.

Each day, the equivalent of roughly three billion songs or five million movies zips between computers, according to the study by Cambridge technology firm CacheLogic.

It estimates Internet users around the globe freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video games.

The rogue exchanges continue to dwarf the nascent market for legitimate music downloads ushered in by the likes of Apple Computer's iTunes.

The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest Internet service providers $10 million (5.4 million pounds) per year each in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic said on Tuesday.

In the light of its findings, the company also questioned the wisdom of the music industry's crackdown on file-sharers.

"One of the biggest myths put forth by the music industry -- that they are winning the war on file-sharing -- is simply wrong," said Andrew Parker, co-founder of CacheLogic.

"It's a case of displacement," he added. "Users are just moving to new networks."

Games and music appear online before they are even released