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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."
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:
Look on the bright side. For every 45 DVD rips downloaded, that's 1 Linux LiveCD that someone has acquired. Therefore, pirating movies is good for Linux adoption!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
Heh. I setup the network for Flying Crocodile. I had 2.5Gb/s available and 100 racks in the Westin circa 2000. We should have been peering. (For those that don't remember, Flyingcroc was known as Sextracker.com)
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
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 own a small hosting firm out of Chicago. Most of our business is made up of Fortune 500 clients and government contracts. We have a wholly owned subsidiary that only does adult entertainment (for obvious reasons). The adult content alone chews through almost 13-16Gb/s (roughly. We get transit from several providers but also peer at two exchanges). Fun stuff. It helped having worked in Van Nuys on the production side years ago. Ahh memories (horrible, horrible ones at that).
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.
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.
"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*
Are you saying Linux is profiting off pirated movies? The MPAA is going to love this!
Considering the amount of credit card fraud, and credit card number generators, I doubt it was because the 'wife' found out. IN fact, I would be surprised if it was about 5%.
"no free blow job"
A blow job from someone who sucks dicks for a living might not be as free as you think it would be~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
0.3 percent of traffic is not going above the speed limit.
Did you host your fag pr0n on linsux servers?
We ran Irix on SGI machines.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
...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.
I hope everyone understands that just because .3 percent of bittorrent files are "definitely legal" does NOT mean that 99.7% of bittorrent files are definitely illegal.
No matter how many press releases the RIAA releases.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"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.
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
Hehe, I'm not sure what you are asking your tech support guy and mechanic to do that you would be concerned with STDs...
I suppose you might have a point on the last one thou!
Well, I don't know about tech support but my vast knowledge of porn tells me that changing someone's tire almost invariably leads to sex on the hood of the car. And maybe the roof.