At least for five minutes
A law designed
to make it easier for copyright holders to go after illicit file-sharers
appears to have have led to a major drop in Internet traffic.
The
Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) law came into
force yesterday and suddenly Internet traffic plummeted by 30 per cent
according to figures from the Netnod Internet Exchange. It suggests that
fileshareing has dropped even more.
Most experts think that after the initial
scare effect, trafffic will pick up in a week or two. Swedish Pirate Party
Chairman Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak, that the movie and music industry
thrives on scaring the common citizen. Henrik Pontén from
Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish anti-piracy office, claimed that the traffic
drop as an indication that the new law is working.
Well not really, in the
past 24 hours 384,657 Swedes were connected to the Pirate Bay tracker alone.
That is close to 5% of the Swedish population, and no less than
before.
It seems that most people are looking for ways to hide their
identities online. Thousands of new customers have visited new anonymising
service mullvad.net.