"Piracy Law" Cuts *Traffic* not "Piracy"

This story is everywhere today:

Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as the country's new anti-piracy law came into effect, reports suggest.

Sweden's new policy - the Local IPRED law - allows copyright holders to force internet service providers (ISP) to reveal details of users sharing files.

According to figures released by the government statistics agency - Statistics Sweden - 8% of the entire population use peer-to-peer sharing.

The implication in these stories is that this kind of law is "working", in the sense that it "obviously" cuts down copyright infringement, because it's cutting down traffic.

In your dreams.

All this means is that people aren't sharing so much stuff online. But now that you can pick up a 1 Terabyte external hard drive for less than a hundred quid - which can store about a quarter of a million songs - guess what people are going to turn to in order to swap files in the future?

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