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Major Flaws Found In Recent BitTorrent Study
Caledfwlch writes with a followup to news we discussed a couple days ago about a study that found only 0.3% of torrents to be legal. (A further 11% was described as "ambiguous.") TorrentFreak looked more deeply into the study and found a number of flaws, suggesting that the researchers' data may have been pulled from a bogus tracker. Quoting:
"Here's where the researchers make total fools out of themselves. In their answer to the question they refer to a table of the top 10 most seeded torrents. ... the most seeded file was uploaded nearly two years ago (The Incredible Hulk) and has a massive 1,112,628 seeders. The torrent in 10th place is not doing bad either with 277,043 seeds. All false data. We're not sure where these numbers originate from but the best seeded torrent at the moment only has 13,739 seeders; that's 1% of what the study reports. Also, the fact that the release is nearly two years old should have sounded some alarm bells. It appears that the researchers have pulled data from a bogus tracker, and it wouldn't be a big surprise if all the torrents in their top 10 are actually fake."
They also take a cursory look at isoHunt, finding that 1.5% of torrent files come from Jamendo alone, "a site that publishes only Creative Commons licensed music."
Does this really surprise anyone?
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Every few months when a WoW patch comes out and millions of computers torrent a few hundred MB. Hulk's got nothing on Night Elves.
Industry group ending in 'AA' pays to have study conducted that supports their views, doesn't care so much about accuracy.
News at eleven.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Moral of the story.... don't trust seedy research.
One major problem with Bit Torrent is that you only get easy access to what is "popular" at any given time. I've gotten some TV show episodes (not available in the US) downloaded in a reasonable amount of time when I start the download within 24 hours of the original show being aired... but try to get the same episode 30 days later and availability drops in a hurry. Despite all the pro-P2P propaganda about how it "democratizes" data, it's really more a mob-rule popularity contest for grabbing the shiniest download.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Some country's laws may flag a torrent as illegal while other countries consider it as legal.
As an example, someone could be downloading a copyrighted song for backup purposes while owning a legitimate copy and these fools will automatically classify this kind of download an infringement.
Ars technica has actually asked the researchers about the issue. Here is the response from Paul Watters, one of the researchers:
Thank you for your enquiry regarding our research report "Investigation into the extent of infringing content on BitTorrent networks". As researchers, we not only stand by the findings that we have arrived at, but - having made our methodology public - we are providing other bona fide researchers to replicate and/or dispute our findings. Their results can in turn be assessed through the peer review process; this is the process that normal research activity takes.
You have raised some interesting points that are fundamental to the validitiy of any study in this area: the sampling strategy; verification of results and so on. We believe that our methodology was rigorously applied to the sample that we obtained. Over time, we will replicate the sampling process, so that we will gain better estimates of the population results. This is the fundamental tenet of statistical sampling.
Ernesto here from TorrentFreak. I do have an academic background and used to teach statistics and research methods to (PhD) students. Not that it matters much, the comments I've made are pretty straightforward.
We are supposed to believe the analysis of a biased entity over professional researchers?
When the professional researchers conclude that "Music, movies and TV shows constituted the three largest categories of shared materials, and among those, zero legal files were found", we have to conclude that they didn't do a very good job, because there are at least two sites (Jamendo and Etree) which allow nothing but legal music files, and both have tracked the exchange of many petabytes of data. (There are many more sites which limit themselves to legal material, but not to music--or TV or movies.)
If I were to do an analysis of FTP, and then deliberately limited my study to "pirate" sites, I would come up with a hopelessly biased sample and useless numbers. It may well be that the legal torrent sites are statistically insignificant, but if they didn't study them, how can they conclude that? Assuming that they are is basically assuming your conclusion. It begs the question.
I agree with your assessment of TorrentFreak, but a lack of credentials and credibility in a critic does not make a study legitimate.