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BitTorrent Use Up 24% Since November
dingalig writes "It looks as though the MPAA's fight against The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites isn't going very well. Ars Technica reports that BitTorrent traffic is up by 24% since before the holidays. 'BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January — about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes [BigChampagne CEO Eric] Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."'"
If they're counting all torrents, then yes the content/patches of WoW would certainly count for a fair bit.
But you'd have to be rather naive to think Linux distros and other legal content (not including WoW) are in any way a measurable part of the total torrent traffic. I have no stats of course (this is Slashdot), except to say that whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.
That could simply be because Linux distros don't need to use TPB since they have their own trackers.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Don't try and make a point about torrents not being 'piracy' by mentioning a few users who downloaded a Linux distro last winter. Anyone knows it's a flawed argument; they're statistically irrelevant anecdotes. Remember those words, as they apply in almost any debate where a general statement is made, and some not too bright person tries to refute it.
Miro is a video feed aggregator, player, search tool, downloader with torrent support; recently out of beta and has improved a lot.
The Miro folks are even trying to help people distribute their videos via bittorrent, esp. as a way to get full SD and HD shows published at low cost.
It kind of competes with Youtube, but with better video quality. It even handles feeds from Youtube.