Did anybody seriously think that the take down of MegaUpload would deter people from piracy? I didn’t think so.

DeepField Networks posted a study on their blog titled, “File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era.” They say that file sharing traffic collapsed on January 18, the day that MegaUpload was shut down and its founder arrested.

They say that MegaUpload downloads represented about 30 to 40 percent of all file sharing. In the span of an hour, global Internet traffic dropped by a huge 3 percent. The copyright industry saw it as a great day for them and a bad day for pirates everywhere.

To preface, the study found that piracy has not decreased. No big surprise there. Pirates just moved to other services. They always have and they always will.

The study is far more interesting than that, however, as it sought to map the infrastructure behind file sharing. They say that the general consensus is that file sharing is spread across the entirety of the Internet where everybody is involved in the business of piracy.

The fact of the matter is that file sharing is located in a centralized part of the Internet. There may be hundreds of file sharing sites, but they all pull from the same six Web sites that drive over 80 percent of all file-sharing traffic.

They found that on January 18, before MegaUpload was taken down, MegaVideo was pushing 34 percent of all file sharing traffic. Most of that traffic was locally hosted in the United States on the servers in Virginia.

For comparison, they looked at file-sharing traffic on January 19. File-sharing traffic did not decrease, it just moved elsewhere. Sites like Putlocker saw a massive jump in their file-sharing traffic.

They conclude that the MegaUpload take down did nothing to combat piracy. All it did was force massive amounts of data to now be transferred from Europe over “expensive transatlantic links.”