The debate about the war on file-sharing isn’t entirely clear-cut. You can see how certain corporations, used to having complete control over the media they produce, are chagrined at a world that, suddenly, treats that media like water, and lets it flow anywhere, any time.

You can see why artists, with an officially Constitutional, if limited, right to profit from their work suddenly lose de facto control of that as well. And you can even concede that, in the end, it probably is illegal to leave hundreds of copyrighted music or video files on your computer for anyone else to download.

All that said, the war on file-sharing is still wrong. A new study, reported on by Ars Technica today, gives an illustration why.

Briefly, the findings are that, in a survey of more than 1.5 million computers, more than a third were found to have LimeWire on them. LimeWire is the most popular file-sharing application; there are many others. Second, it says that BitTorrent use has grown 25 percent in the last six months.

More on the significance of those figures in a second.

The methodology for the survey seems to come from a company that removes adware and spyware from computers. How that might affect the sample is hard to assess. Folks smart enough to run file-sharing programs would presumably know how to run anti-virus programs; on the other hand, since file-sharing applications are often a source of spyware and adware, it’s possible the sample self-selects to people who file-share a lot. Indeed, while Ars doesn’t say it, it seems from some accompanying graphs that file-sharing applications of one form or another appeared on a total of nearly 80 percent of the PC’s examined. That number seems quite high.

However, in some notes accompanying the survey, one of the people who ran it acknowledges the difficulties of getting good data, but points out that given the size of the sample and the consistency of the analysis over time, it has particular insight when it comes to tracking changes in usage.

That’s the sobering part:

1. Even if the sample is skewed by 50 percent, an installation base of 36 percent for just one file-sharing protocol, LimeWire, demonstrates how fruitless the RIAA’s legal war is; even thousands of mass suits against a user base that may number in the tens of millions is senseless. It seems puny, and petulant.
2. But the BitTorrent numbers are simply devastating. In a traditional file-sharing program like LimeWire, files are shared person-to-person. (That’s where the name “peer-to-peer,” comes from, often abbreviated P2P.) “Torrenting” is often called file-sharing on steroids, but it’s conceptually different. With a program like BitTorrent, a large number of “seeds” torrents the files in pieces around the net, so you can download it simultaneously from many other places, making for vastly shortened download times. On BitTorrent networks, people don’t swap single songs; they swap albums or, increasingly large “discography” files, containing all the released albums of a particular artist. And then, of course, it’s also a powerful tool for exchanging video files, which are much larger than mere songs..
3. In other words, the move toward torrenting may represent an increase in file-sharing by an order of magnitude. It’s impossible to really put figures to such trends, but it’s possible that just the 25 percent increase in BitTorrent use in a particular period could equal several years’ worth of filesharing under LimeWire-style programs of the past. In this context, the war on file-sharing in the music world is already over; within just a few years it will be common easily to swap entire record libraries or more, and people will soon have more music on their computers than they can realistically hope to ever listen to.
4. And the growth suggests one other thing as well: The same will soon be able to be said about the TV and film world.