I came across an interesting article on filesharing the other day, declaring the winners and losers of the battle in the last year. Of all the winners, Apple is the only corporate entity to make the list, sharing mentions with The Pirate Bay, Limewire and Opensource P2P. The big winner is BitTorrent, for reasons which should be blindingly obvious.

There is little doubt BitTorrent has emerged as the quintessential file-sharing protocol in 2005. Estimates on its size are staggering – anywhere from 60%-90% of a ISPs bandwidth is consumed by this protocol. In addition, it’s suggested that up to 10 million individuals are transferring files via the BitTorrent protocol at any given moment.

BitTorrent has emerged as a legitimate distribution source as well. Being a highly efficient protocol for the distribution large files, it has become a popular method for distributing the Linux operating system and authorized multimedia entertainment.

The RIAA is one of the year’s biggest losers, surprising nobody, alongside Sony-BMG (thanks to their ongoing rootkit fiasco), Grokster, Sharman Networks and the Pay P2P business model.

But what good is a Supreme Court victory if you can’t enforce it? January 2005 began with 8.4 million calculable P2P users. By June, this number had grown to 8.9 million. Today, it resides at 9.4 million users (without including BitTorrent users), with no slowdown in sight.

It’s become apparent the RIAA’s lawsuits, whether against individuals or file-sharing developers, are having the exact opposite effect on the exchange of information. Adding to the RIAA’s woes, the authorized digital music market is showing signs that it is not the silver bullet the record labels hoped it would be. Indeed, music sales have stagnated going into the fourth quarter of 2005.

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