Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal

Andorin writes "It's common knowledge that the majority of files distributed over BitTorrent violate copyright, though the exact percentage is unclear. The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory of the University of Ballarat in Australia has conducted a study and found that 89% of files examined were in fact infringing, while most of the remaining 11% were ambiguous but likely to be infringing. Ars Technica summarizes the study: 'The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used. Each file was manually checked to see whether it was being legally distributed. Only three cases—0.3 percent of the files—were determined to be definitely not infringing, while 890 files were confirmed to be illegal. ' The study brings with it some other interesting statistics; out of the 1,000 files, 91 were pornographic, and approximately 4% of torrents were responsible for 80% of seeders. Music, movies and TV shows constituted the three largest categories of shared materials, and among those, zero legal files were found."

Comments

Boo hoo hoo.

[girlintraining]

1986: Hey man, want a copy of this movie I got? Sure, I'll just pop it in my VCR and make a duplicate.

2010: Hey man, want a copy of this movie I got? knock, knock Aw crap, it's the police! *thud* *smack* ow! ow! ow!

RIAA -- Advocating social and technological progress since... ha ha, never you dopes!

Re:Princeton Study

[cappp]

I'm not sure what "blizzards trackers" are, and I'm probably missing the point entirely, but they addressed the limits of their paper:

the results apply only to the Mainline trackerless BitTorrent system that we surveyed. Other parts of the BitTorrent ecosystem might be different. Second, all files that were available were equally likely to appear in the sample -- the sample was not weighted by number of downloads, and it probably contains files that were never downloaded at all. So we can't say anything about the characteristics of BitTorrent downloads, or even of files that are downloaded via BitTorrent, only about files that are available on BitTorrent.

. Maybe someone with a little insight into how BitTorrent works could comment on the rigour of their methodoly?

Those statistics look familiar.

[kurokame]

infringing torrents :: ambiguous :: legal

porn :: probably porn :: normal content

spam :: probably spam :: real emails

blog posts :: lazily disguised reposts :: real news

fake google results :: crappy sites :: what you were actually searching for

And so forth...within a small margin, this appears to be the standard ratio of the internet.

Re:As I said in the earlier story on porn...

[Frosty Piss]

Internet = porn.

I used to work for IEG (Internet Entertainment Group - WikiPedia Page - once the largest Internet porn company in the world). We regularly seeded the Interwebs with snippets of our best porn because while the majority of people would accept our 2 minute gifts of hardcore fucking and sucking and grunting drenched in lube and sweat and go no farther, a small percentage - maybe 2 or 3 - would sign up for the full deal. VERY profitable. We never really cared much about "piracy" since most of the people interested in spending money on porn would eventually end up giving us their credit card number.

Of course, in 20% of the sign-ups, "wife" would find out, and we would have charge-backs from people that denied ever having been to our sites.

On a different note, we had one of the biggest Internet "pipe" into a single company in the world in the late 1990's and early 2000's. People never believed me when I told them what our conx was, they insisted it must be for the entire building, not just our half floor in a beautiful glass tower in downtown Seattle (a block from Pike Place Market). And, while we had a HUGE library of porn, our offices did not have naked porn stars running about, no free blow jobs.

Selection bias

[munky99999]

0.3% chance this report isnt selection bias. Only 1000 torrents? Only 23 trackers? Why not 25? Was those extra 2 going to destroy your stats? How about 1 million torrents, taken from a specific date in time; over as many trackers you can find. http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Legal_torrent_sites Omg I did 250,000 torrents and only went to the above link for 29 trackers. New article: Study analyses 29 trackers, more then previously, finds 100% torrents legal.

Definitively,

[AmigaHeretic]

0.3 percent of traffic is not going above the speed limit.

Cloud storage

[IndustrialComplex]

I use bittorrent as a bit of a poor-man's cloud storage.

I've got a ton of CDs I've purchased, and after a flood and a series of moves the HDs where I stored the ripped (low quality) MP3s were destroyed.

So now whenever I want to listen to a CD that I've purchased, I just download the CD using bittorrent, usually as FLAC, and add the FLAC files to the library I'm rebuilding. I don't have to worry about setting up the ripping software, and I'm actually getting it a bit better organized this time.

So for me, that 'illegal' content is just me rebuilding my digital copies of CDs or DVDs I legally own.