Millions of people download from newsgroups and irc and go uncounted. As do all the AIM/instant message users. There are also smaller networks, there are private servers/channels/hubs. There are p2p apps and services that only share within a local LAN network. (ideal for file-hungry but increasingly-restricted university accounts) All of the users of these P2P methods form a second tier of P2P: the vast uncounted file sharer population.

SneakerNet

And with the ease of burning CDs these days, the unmonitored “sneaker-net” has exploded. Gone are the old days when making a copy for a friend meant spending 40 minutes taping a scratched LP. Now perfect digital copies can be made in less than a tenth of the time – and for a fraction of the material cost. Unlike cassettes, each new CD generation can be copied indefinitely. The sneakernet helps make up for the quality shortfall of downloaded music: lossy formats with quality too poor to warrant a permanent archive. If Big Music had any idea of just how many people now share burned CDs, this just might be their worst nightmare come true. In the 1980s, BM declared nuclear war on digital audio tape (DAT) and won, and now a similar situation exists with copied CDs that gets a smaller portion of BM’s attention since the start of the P2P revolution. Yet the sneakernet may well be the largest unofficial “P2P network”.