Growth In P2P Usage Ruining Physical Pirate Market

I’m so used to hearing media companies complaining about how the growth in P2P is killing their business, but I just read a very interesting interview with a physical pirate (the guys selling DVDs etc in car parks) complaining about how P2P took away his livelihood. TorrentFreak came across a pirate called Tony who used to make a fortune in the 1990s and even ran a small factory producing bootlegs, but he had to quit as the growth in P2P took away his customers:

“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”

I’ve always wondered why people buy bootleg copies from physical pirates when their copies tend to be quite poor and expensive, especially when you can get better copies for free online. I hadn’t considered before that pirates are facing hard times thanks to P2P.

I wonder how much the overall piracy market has grown over the last 5 years or so, or has the rapid growth in P2P over the last couple of years a result of users switching away from buying from physical pirates, or copying directly from their friends copies?

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