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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."
Internet = porn. Folks, just keep it legal and no one at MaBell will care. Don't look at kiddies and don't steal anything. Is it hard for you slashdotters to follow each of these rules??? Come on...
I am definitively not impressed.
Choosing the most popular seeds gives very skewed results. I bet the overall percentage of pornographic torrents is much higher than 9%. Similarly, we may see a large change in the number of legal files.
I think the zero legal music / tv / movie files can be attributed to those types of files that are legal to distribute are usually just done so by http or ftp servers. They don't get put into a torrent type download system.
I'm not surprised that 4% of the files were being downloaded by 80% of the community. I bet the #1 file was being downloaded by more than 50% of the community. Individuals can, and often do, download more than one file at a time.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They ultimatly found approx. 1% to be legal.
The Princeton piece makes for an interesting read because they do a good job of breaking down their catagories and providing some detailed context. For instance, 53% of the porn was in English and 5% of the software was Spanish language. Just really rich data for anyone into this kind of analysis. The final paragraph on how they decided if content was illegal reads:
That seems like exactly the wrong way to do a survey. Way to go.
I find 100% of money spent on this study definitely wasted.
You're kidding me, it's that high...wow!!
"The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files--a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used."
Most Active. Charming. It's almost like saying, "of the 1,000 most illegal torrents, almost 1,000 of them are illegal." I want to know about the millions of other files on BT, not the ones most likely to be illegal. Also: 1,000 randomly selected out of how many of the most active torrents?
Bad study is bad, or at least bad press release is bad, and I can smell the spin from 5,000 miles away.
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.
Just so you know, University of Ballarat of a corporate whore. I went there for a while before I realised what a fucking joke it was. Not saying that this means the results are bullshit but it's certainly food for thought.
How Ironic that the day this post shows up on /. VODO had an release up which is a movie and is 100% legal and very highly transferred over torrents.
The.Yes.Men.Fix.The.World.P2P.Edition.2010.XviD-VODO & The.Yes.Men.Fix.The.World.P2P.Edition.2010.HQ.x264-VODO
This study is flawed and what trackers did they use or how did they truly pick the randomization?
I mean if they pick the 1000 random torrents from a piracy site, then my guess is their results would this way, but if they select other trackers/locations/etc they would likely find that 100% of the traffic is legal and proper.
Also remember that statistics just show how biased the statistician is when they interpret the results and decide how to present them.
I think it's about time they legalize piracy.
The summary states:
The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used.
Clearly then the sample isn't a random subset of 'all torrents' but instead of 'popular torrents on certain trackers.' This does not justify the proposition in the title "Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal."
That aside, fat chance I'm going to trust The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory to keep their science unbiased in this regard. Seriously, for whom would a sample size of 1,000 torrents seem even close to enough?
the most powerful intellect is that unbounded by indubitable preconception
'The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used
this being the bit I picked out. this can vary greatly tracker to tracker.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
Okay, I used to use BitTorrent for downloading Linux and a bunch of other things, rather than downloading directly from mirrors. Do you know why I don't know? Because Bell Canada throttles BitTorrent traffic, but not plain HTTP and FTP traffic.
Those bastards broke legitimate uses of BitTorrent, and now they complain that only pirates use it.
I don't think this study is about legal files; I think it's about files that are legal to distrbute freely. There's a big difference; illegal files would be ones illegal to possess, period. Unless copyright law has changed, it covers distribution, not possession. Pedantic point, maybe, but illegal files really does refer to something, but not merely copyrighted works whose authors don't allow free distribution.
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.
If anybody fscks with my ability to download my linux distros at 1.5MB-2.0MB per second, i will seriously be pissed. BitTorrent is the only method by which i can reliably attain these speeds. I'm willing to forgo the BitTorrent protocol in principle, but only in favor of an even better technology
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.
Note "from the most active seeded files"
In other words, this doesn't really mean that only "0.3% of BitTorrent Files" are definitely legal.. far more might be legal but not among the top active torrents.
That could mean there are plenty of legal torrents, but they don't make the list of top active ones, because (perhaps) illegal ones are more popular for an audience that is larger.
Doesn't negate that there are plenty of legal torrents, Linux ISOs, etc, and BitTorrent is commonly used as a legal distribution mechanism. But they are looking at public free-for-all trackers which are already potentially biased towards containing spam and other crap that you would expect people on any pre-bittorrent P2P system to be offering.
In fact, their study only applies to the most active torrent files.
I am not surprised that if you consider only the most active seeded files, that a lot of them are illegal, especially in regards to music files.
But if you use a methodology that doesn't artifically limit your sample to the most active torrent files as indicated by TPB or isoHunt, something completely different may be found.
IOW: researchers, take yer study and shove it until you can uh stop using a biased sampling method like "most active".
This is like taking a survey of FTP servers, and only looking at ones that report having the most users connecting, and allow anyone to upload any file, and others to immediately download it.
To claim 0.3% of files on FTP are definitely legal.
Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to the actual study, so it is impossible to tell if their methods really are accurate. However, I do believe that only 1000 of the most highly seeded files is not an accurate representation of all BitTorrent traffic. In fact that very requirement that they be the highest seeded sets up a bias within this study. A study of 100,000 randomly selected files from as many trackers as they can find would yeild far more acurate results.
Who knows? Maybe this is what they did originally and their results were not as cut and dried as their corporate backers wanted. I note that the Internet Commerce Security Lab at the University of Ballarat doesn't detail their "collaborative partnerships within industry" on the website.
"Copyrighted" refers to the work. "Infringing" refers to the *use* of the work. The first does not imply the second.
The aricle says they checked "...whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted..." And then apparently made the jump to assuming that anything copyrighted must be illegal, sliding immediately into called them "infringing files."
Of course by that metric all the Linux distros are illegal as well since they too are "copyrighted." As is any blog post, web page, or photo taken in the last, say, 70 years. As is anything that is shared properly according to the terms of any license. Now the study may have actually looked at the license terms in place for each work, but this definitely not what the article *said*.
Not to mention that regardless of any express license terms, sharing that qualifies as fair use is also NOT AN INFRINGMENT and is LEGAL and should not be described as illegal or as "infringing files."
Any indication whether these types of things (terms of the licenses according to each item, whether the sharing events qualified as fair use) were taken into account? If not, then I'd counter by noting that 100% of the material on Warner Bros' home page is copyrighted too. Should I say it's being shared "illegally"? Of course not, but my whole point is that if you play with semantics loosely enough, you'll find that probably the vast majority of the material on the Net as a whole is "illegal" and "copyrighted."
*grumble*
Actually its perfectly legal for you to download a copy but if you distribute any of it (which you do while you download with bittorrent) its illegal.
No, as they went out and found the torrent files themselves, which while blizzard uses the bittorrent protocol, it doesn't use the files. A torrent file is just a list of trackers anyways, so instead the probably put that into the code or a config file somewhere.
Nope. While Blizzard uses a custom BT client, you can find a standard BitTorrent file in the clients files. This file works just fine with other BT clients.
You buy the right to listen to that song, so long as you are the demonstrable owner of that right. It's always been this way.
If you destroyed, then yes, like anything else, you have to pay to replace it, just as with a ticket to a show or fare on a train. Proof of original purchase is not proof that you haven't sold it and are trying to scam.
If stolen, you deal with it like any other stolen property/assets. That means if it's not insured and the thief is not found, you're paying to replace it like anything else.
If lost, you're paying to replace it unless part of what you paid was for a replacement service. Many merchants, like Ticketmaster and oftentimes digital distributors, offer the ability to replace unique goods by disabling the lost/stolen item and re-issuing (one silver lining of DRM).
If it's damaged, you might have to pay to replace it. It's your responsibility to take care of the things you own (just imagine trying to cash in an illegible and shredded stock certificate!). You may be able to send the damaged unit back for a replacement for a nominal fee. Many CD/DVD publishers do this as a value-added service. If you failed to safeguard your purchases, it's no one's fault but your own.
Is it really immoral to pretend i made a copy of it and download it from bittorrent?
Of course it is. Lies and deception are immoral. They may be justified in some circumstances, but that doesn't change their basic nature.
It's just a form of rationalization to say "I did something wrong but it's not really wrong because someone else wronged me first." Two wrongs don't make a right.
Is it justified for you to participate in an unlawful distribution in order to remedy your carelessness? Perhaps.
Thus, is that copy of Spice Girls really illegal in my case?
Absolutely.
You participated in an unauthorized distribution and have no demonstrated ownership of the applicable legal rights. If it were litigated in a vacuum, you'd lose on the merits.
What you're asking is simply whether the ends justify the means, and 99.9% of the time, breaking the law as self help is still just breaking the law.
Chances are the injury is so marginal as to not be worth anyone's time, like when the traffic court decides to dismiss a citation because it's not worth the effort. It's a cost/benefit analysis.
You're asking three discrete questions: Is it moral? Is it legal? Will I be punished?
In your example, the answers are no, no, and probably not.
The trouble with the "peer to peer" systems today is that they're horrendously inefficient ways of transmitting the same data around. It's gotten better, but still, the same data passes back and forth across intercontinental undersea cables multiple times.
Many years ago, when I was going to school in Cleveland, I stood on an overpass and watched two coal trains passing each other, in opposite directions. And I thought that some day, computers would be smart enough to get the owners of that coal in touch with each other so they could cut a deal and avoid the wasted transportation. And indeed, that happened.
But now we have the same huge data files passing each other, in opposite directions. This is lame. Especially since USENET got it right. If the "peer to peer" systems weren't so focused on piracy, they could work much better.
I do not trust any conclusion drawn from single digit population sizes. Multiply the sample size by 10 and maybe I'll start to listen.
There's a huge difference in 3/1,000 vs. 30/10,000.
0.3 percent of traffic is not going above the speed limit.
Alright -- to respond to myself --it does look like the researchers did some sort of manual license checking for each commonly-shared work, but the article is pretty silent on what, exactly, that entailed. I'm virtually certain it didn't involve checking for fair use possibilities.
I'm curious as to how the same logic would have described the simple use of a VCR prior to the Sony case: "100% of material recorded on VCRs is copyrighted and definitely illegal." All copyrighted, yes, but much of the recording activity was later found to be "time-shifting": a fair use, and therefore legal and not an infringement.
What I'd really like to see therefore is a study where the researchers sample of the downloaders/sharers involved to see whether they make fair-use-sounding arguments or not. (Couldn't buy it another way, replacing my lost or worn-out copy, sampling music I wouldn't have bought otherwise, etc.) Sure some of this might not pass muster as fair use if eventually tested, but it makes a difference, particularly since, as the article notes, P2P users actually buy more media per capital than non-P2P users.
Such a study wouldn't break down content by "type of content" but by "type of use". Not doing so is a dead giveaway that the study isn't designed to seriously address the fair use issues at all.
I can download Total Commander from author's site.
I can download Total Commander (with added files, which do not modify original Total Commander files) from torrent sites as well.
If I download it from torrent site, will this study consider it as a piracy?
This study is flawed beyond comprehension.
I've seen a lot of Islamic materials (The Koran, etc.) out there that, AFAIK, is out of copyright and has thousands of seeders.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Is it also true that only 0.3% of VHS tapes contain legal content when it was at its peak ?
And i heard a lot of those old audio tapes(cassete recorders) had content that was just copied from other tapes (tape-to-tape they called it), people used to take them to concerts and release "bootleg" recordings.
How the industry has continued to survive with such blazen disrespect for the laws surrounding th music(ians) they love is beyond me.
Perhaps it would appropriate to start an appeal so we can all donate money to these needy organisations (RIAA/MPAA) that look after the interests of musicians.
Oh yea, im being sarcastic
Used to be, artists wanted to be heard. Nowadays, all these newfangled "artists" just want their pocketbooks expanded real easy like. Not sure who to blame, really. You might call 'em greedy, but you might say good vibrations don't fill an empty stomach, nor put a roof over your head. Might be a time they did. Not this time.
I guess the latest Knoppix build won't outdo Windows 7, then.
"You buy the right to listen to that song, so long as you are the demonstrable owner of that right. It's always been this way."
Really? Do you mean that if I hear that song accidentally, and I cannot demonstrate a right to listen, I am somehow in the wrong?
Wait a minute: YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THAT YOU CAN TRADE IN A RIGHT TO LISTEN?
Next week, it'll be a discussion on "right to feel, right to see, right to smell, and right to taste", and how these rights can be traded.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
"it's clear that Linux distros weren't exactly dominating the charts here"
I haven't really paid that much attention in the past, but just checking Debian now they have their own tracker, and I suppose many of the other Linux distros could be using trackers not on that list of 23. If all the major distros use their own trackers, then obviously most Linux bittorrent traffic wouldn't be on public trackers, and that statement is ludicrous.
We are all God's parents.
I don't know about you, but I've never seeded to a ratio of "just 10,000".
...There is a problem with the law, not with everyone. Laws where supposed to keep some social contracts working - like not running around killing everyone, paying taxes to support commons etc. When everyone is breaking the law - that means that the law does not reflect current situation in a society. Either this - or you have a tyranny where the minority dictates everyone what to do.
From a sample of the top 1000, what did you expect ? A lot of the general public still doesn't even know what Linux is (I presume Linux ISO are pretty popular legal bittorrents).
New things are always on the horizon
Looking at the study it immediately appears to be fundamentally flawed by the simple fact that the trackers analysed were in fact pirate trackers? What on earth did they expect. I'm actually quite surprised that there was even 0.3% legit content shared. If this test was to have been conducted properly they should have;
Sampled traffic at ISP using DPI to look for torrent data
Sampled from several ISPs
Sampled in multiple geographic locations
Not go to a well known warez tracker and click sort by most seeded and then write them all down. I can only assume that this was funded by a large organisation to reinforce their already decided oppinion.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Hunting is a "legal use" of guns, which will change your assumed numbers significantly. Whether it's enough to get over 50% would be a very interesting question, though.
How much of private gun ownership results in use?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Furthermore, the accepted way to upgrade Windows is "download the latest install image", while the accepted way to upgrade Linux is "click 'Upgrade'"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Those concerned about the vilification of BitTorrent should deliberately increase its legitimate uses.
What if the major Linux distributions started using BitTorrent as the default mechanism to retrieve packages?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Nah, 50% is easy. There are, roughly speaking, 1 million violent crimes per year in the U.S. (many of which will not involve guns).
You don't need to combine the deer harvest from too many states to get a similar number. And that probably doesn't really account for the majority of recreational shooting.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"From a sample of the top 1000, what did you expect ?"
Personally I would expect a universty to know how to take an unbiased sample but TFS states - "a random selection from the most active seeded files", ie: a random sample taken from a non-random subset of files.
If this represents the quality of statistical methods from Ballarat Uni, I think they should stick to handing out degrees in sheep castration.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How much of private gun ownership results in legal use?
Self-defense use: Between 100,000 and 2.5 million incidents per year, depending on who you ask and how they define their terms and gather their statistics. The low end of that range is from the anti-gun organizations, like the Brady Campaign. Most academic researchers get numbers towards the high end of that range.
Hunting use: Huge
Target shooting use: Seriously huge
I see what you were trying to get at, but you need a better example. Legal uses of firearms vastly outnumber illegal uses.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It is incredibly ignorant to assume that the majority of gun use is bad guys and vigilantes shooting at people. There are a number of ways to legally shoot a firearm (hunting, target practice, sport shooting) that dwarf the use for nefarious purposes if you want to compare rounds fired. Regardless, the reason Americans allow gun ownership is enumerated in our constition:
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
How many Linux distributions use popular trackers, rather than running their own? They already run web and FTP servers, and mirrors for both. Adding a BitTorrent tracker is trivial, and means that they have control over their own infrastructure (something Linux users tend to care more than a little about).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nobody says that most bit torrent traffic is legal. What people say is that there is a significant amount of legal bittorrent activity. Check out bt.etree.org for one good example. If you kill bittorrent, you kill free legal trading of music on the internet.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Meh. If you look at statistics of gun violence between countries where gun ownership is a right (US) and countries that heavily regulate gun use (Canada, Britain, Australia, any other country) you'll see that there's far more gun violence, and violence in general, in the US. The number of legal uses for guns isn't any excuse for allowing people to be killed by them over and over and over again.
You buy a piece of plastic. That's all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The idea that anything on the internet can be declared "illegal" is absurd..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
i'd rather see them stick to statistics (which we can easily discard) instead of trusting their students to properly handle the poor animals....
Whether it's legal or illegal doesn't matter. It's a distraction away from the real intention of just killing all forms of real peer to peer networking. And it is why we should demand that the ISP operate as a dumb pipe, a simple router like the one sitting on my shelf, nothing more.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Ball A Rat? am i the only one that finds that funny? probably so.
I wonder how much of the "infringing" material would have been classified as non-infringing if copyright terms had remained at 14 years instead of "indefinitely." They said that most of the material was music, movies, and TV shows; and very few of those works have entered the public domain since the 1920's.
If you take away all of the gun violence, we still have a higher murder rate than most other industrialized nations. It's not the guns.
Switzerland has millions of assault rifles in private hands, but a low crime rate. It's not the guns.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No one is arguing that the freedom of gun ownership does not have a price. I suggest you think hard about what freedoms you have and what you are willing to do or sacrifice to keep them before you condemn our gun rights.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
No. Accurate measurable numbers are needed. With inaccurate numbers such as these, lobby groups can convince government to regulate, hinder or even ban torrent usage harming legitimate usage. They can also convince the uninformed public that downloading anything is a crime and morally wrong. Also what happens if/when the numbers flip where legal usage is in the majority but people still think it's wrong. There are still many terms that are feared and can make stuff look bad when it is not. Terms like radiation make things look dangerous where in fact all electronics emit some form of radiation.
Some files produce vastly more bittorrent traffic than others. Im sure WOW updates using bittorrent are substantially more
than 0.3% of bittorrent traffic by themselves. Many seeders do not seed pirated content.
It's a fair statistical method, it just shows something different than the title claims. It may even perhaps be a more interesting result than a flat random sample (it shows what people are *actually* sharing, weighted by how much, rather than how many times you've uploaded videos of your recital nobody cares about).
Checked a few of these torrents that are so ridiculously popular, and so far they are all FAKES!!!
I don't know where they're getting their data from, but it looks like bogus trackers.
I'm laughing so hard I want to cry.
The essence of time is transient. Always be sure to make haste slowly.
But then every Swiss household that has an assault rifle also has at least 1 person who received military training with that very same weapon.
In other words, they know bloody well it is a tool for killing people, not a dick-replacement for middle-aged balding men.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
As the first AC replied to you, there is no such limit, and the court looks at a lot of factors in order to decide if a use is fair use. One of these factors is if the reuser has invested sufficient creativity of his own in relation to the amount used.
It could be perfectly legal for tens of thousands of individuals to each choose a short time period out of a movie, and then invest the time and effort to analyze it and write commentary, thus making it possible to distribute 100% of the movie legally. Of course, it's never going to actually happen, because as time goes on it will be easier and easier to illegally distribute the movie without all of this rigamarole.
Yet the US allows gun ownership
The US doesn't "allow" gun ownership. We recognize it as a fundamental human right, the right of self-defense.
In other words, they know bloody well it is a tool for killing people, not a dick-replacement for middle-aged balding men.
You act like middle-aged balding men are the leading demographic of gun crimes.
With inaccurate numbers such as these, lobby groups can convince government to regulate, hinder or even ban torrent usage harming legitimate usage.
I'm not at all surprised by these numbers for one important reason: if a file can be downloaded legally, most people (including myself) will simply skip the whole torrenting business and simply download direct through http/ftp. I use Linux: you'd better believe I'd rather download direct than use a torrent; it's faster and easier that way.
As much as people (especially on this forum) would like to pretend otherwise, the main reason the bittorrent protocol still exists and is used today is copyright infringement. This will never change.
If media lobbying groups do manage to illegalize the bittorent protocol, another P2P protocol will simply rise to take its place. You can't illegalize two computers connecting to each other. As long as that remains true, there will always be a P2P protocol in use, and it will always be used primarily for copyright infringement.
Personally, I think this is awesome. The IP laws, especially in the US, have become very very flawed, and this helps regulate that. Now we just need 3d printing technology to advance to the point where P2P patent infringement becomes viable.
Yeah, fakers will use software to artificially boost the stats of their torrents, so that people who aren't paying attention to the feedback on the tracker site will go ahead and grab them. You can't go solely by the number of seeders/leechers in determining torrent popularity.
Legal uses of firearms vastly outnumber illegal uses.
I see what you were trying to get at, but you're right only, if you admit that it is legal for some country ("A", say - North Korea) to use serious numbers of firearms and other weapons against other country ("B", say - USA) just because they don't like their political/economical system ("C", say - democracy/capitalism/neoliberalism).
No, you didn't see what I was getting at. My comment didn't address military usage of firearms at all. I was referring strictly to legal civilian use in the United States. Personal self-defense, lawful hunting and lawful target shooting.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Whatever inaccuracies are in this study (and I doubt it is that inaccurate, TFS just describes their research badly), accurate numbers really wouldn't undermine the case against piracy. What puts legitimate usage at risk is not originally "lobby groups", it is the illegitimate users - i.e. the pirates - that threaten legitimate usage. If it weren't for the mass free-loading, then those of us fighting to protect digital freedoms would have a much stronger case.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
91 out of 1000 is porn, thats like 0.9% of torrent content by authors who probably don't mind ? Where did they select these torrents? From a 'warez' site or from somewhere else ? It's unclear. I'm not going hippiecrite here but i would also like to question the legality of some copyright claims and repeat the fact that whoever gets downloaded the most probably also sells the most copies of his or her POPular product. I feel really sorry for Lars if he has to wait another month for his new swimming pool, but hypothetically speaking, if i would know where to find these criminals, i'd be happy to use their services because i'm a huge fan of that band Try before you Buy. 90% of games is crap, 90% of movies is crap. Are there any statistics on how many lady Gaga songs were downloaded over the last year? Does she look hungry to you? No, she's not even skinny. Do Hollywood movie companies make losses because of piracy or because of their own constructs to evade taxes ? Did Turbine go bankrupt since their flagship went free to play? Will Lotro stick to the old business model and sue its customer base instead of adapting? On moral grounds i say the big companies are the wrong doers here, on legal grounds ofcourse, he who writes the law is always right, right? I hope the day comes sooner when these hogs see that all the money spent on lawsuits is in fact money wasted, money that could have been used to develop new ways of making money or adapting their old companies to compete with the new ones who are customer-friendly (giving out a product and then letting people decide if they WANT to pay for it, i say that's pretty customer friendly) Then again, like someone above here said, who cares? Look what happened when they criminalized the sales of alcohol :p
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
How can one tell if peers/files are real or not unless the torrent is actually downloaded? Did they really download everything to verify it? There ARE a majority of torrents with fake peers. The traffic isn't real but one can only tell after getting burned trying to download it.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Other commenters have already addressed the notion of whether a file can be legal or illegal in and of itself.
However, it seems that the article in question, and the ensuing discussion here, is confusing illegal files with illegal file transfer.
For example, while a copyright-protected music file is illegal to download in the U.S., it is perfectly legal to download in Canada.
Thus, the discussion becomes unclear as to whether we are discussing illegal files or illegal file transfers.
Redaction is up: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/26/1857224/Major-Flaws-Found-In-Recent-BitTorrent-Study
Makes me feel a little better now.
The essence of time is transient. Always be sure to make haste slowly.
A/C is probably not going to read this. Still...
The "property" you are discussing doesn't really exist. It's called "intellectual property", and only has value when it is heard. Or seen. Or felt.
If it is heard or seen without "suitable permission", is the person hearing or seeing breaking the law? Note that the fee for the lecture is a fee to be inside a lecture hall. It is not actually a fee to hear the lecture. Sneaking in is not a "crime of hearing" -- that is absurd. It is trespass.
This "hearing" and "seeing" thing cannot be controlled. Even if you really, really want to. The attempt to control these things would be considered unethical by sane people.
Which really makes "intellectual property" a silly notion. I much prefer the proper use of the three types of "intellectual property": Copyrights, Patents, and Trade Secrets.
And none of the three states, implies, or mentions any right of sensory control. The closest notion would be Trade Secret, wherein if the Trade Secret is accidentally divulged, it ceases to be a Trade Secret.
To predict the next argument -- why are people being asked to pay money to play radios in public places? Copyright controls reproduction, and a reproduction right can give rise to a performance right.
Its still not a "listening right".
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061