Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal 321
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."
As I said in the earlier story on porn... (Score:1, Insightful)
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...
Choosing the most popular seeds... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
0 media legal (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Biases survey exaggerating illegal files. (Score:1, Insightful)
That seems like exactly the wrong way to do a survey. Way to go.
They needed a study for this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Choosing the most popular seeds... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was about to point out the same, most legal seeds are probably not among the most active. I'm not trying to be apologetic about the rampant piracy that Torrents are also used for, however saying that only 0.3% are legal is misleading, using the selection criteria they did, and a relatively small sampling at that.
wow. talk about skew. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:0 media legal (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely disagree, a lot of times free media gets put into torrents and sometimes is the only way to even get it.
People that are not making money do not have the money to pay for the bandwidth to distribute to many people.
for example see Pioneer One.
Re:Boo hoo hoo. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because giving a copy of a movie to a friend is exactly the same as distributing the movie to tens of thousands of people over the internet.
Self-fulfilling prophesy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be higher if they were doing it from a country where TV/music sharing was legal.
Re:Princeton Study (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think anybody will argue that Bittorrent is not a vector for piracy. It most certainly is. I think most will even go further and concede that its primarily used for that purpose -- but these studies try to convince us that this is the *only* reason that Bittorrent exists and that is just plain silly. There are so many biases at play in this "research" that I almost don't know where to begin.
I am not familiar with the prior Princeton study so much, but this more recent one is problematic in that they used a "random" selection of the "most actively seeded files". These are actually contradictory terms. Either the sample is random, or its comprised of the most actively seeded files -- to say that its a random sampling of a non-random subset is misleading at best.
Anyone who's ever looked around on a tracker knows the real percentage is much higher. There's TONS of self-published material all over bit torrent particularly in the music and ebooks categories. While most of the ebooks might well be what most of us would consider "spam" ("Make $10,000 dollars in 7 days!"), they are almost certainly not copyrighted material in the sense that we would think of it. There may actaully be some copyright asserted, but I doubt any of these have been properly submitted to the library of congress and their authors quite clearly intend for you to distribute them.
Speaking of files you are intended to distribute, you also see quite a few game patches, service packs and other large files hosted on bittorrent. For instance, there's probably 100 torrents on the Pirate Bay right now that are just iPhone firmwares. While these may be technically still copyrighted material, they are *intended* for distribution. Simply being under copyright does not mean a file is not meant to be shared. In fact, some companies distribute their patches via bittorrent directly, such as Blizzard, but the trackers they use are almost certainly not included in this study. In fact, there are trackers that deal exclusively in legal-to-distribute content and they are clearly excluded from these sorts of studies. This further increases the bias in the results.
Moreover the are the more murkier issues of international laws. What is copyrighted in the United States can easily be public domain somewhere else. The internet does not know geographic boundaries, so establishing the legality of a file is almost never going to be a black or white issue.
Re:0 media legal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Princeton Study (Score:4, Insightful)
The argument is that it's pretty damn hard to get a "random sample" form trackers, so these guys found the piratebay et al style trackers, and took "1000 MOST ACTIVE" torrents.
For those who don't get the reference - what do you think will be more popular: indie legal stuff, or the latest hottest hollywood movie that just came out? Now come back to the fact that most P2P "protection" companies work exactly like this - they dump a fake torrent, and plant several hundred "seeds" on it to appear legitimate - the more the better. As a result what you get is that most of the IronMan2[DVDRIP].avi with a thousand seeds while movie is still in theatres is nothing but yet another mediadefender et al honeypot where they try to fish for ips with possibility to sue.
The sample is not just flawed, it's either ignorantly or purposefully picked in the worst possible way to bias the study without being glaringly obvious to people who don't understand how bittorrent works and how communities around it usually act. I wouldn't be surprised if a major amount of torrents they found "illegal" are fake honeypots.
Re:Boo hoo hoo. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Copyrighted" is not "Infringing," dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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*
Re:wow. talk about skew. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Copyrighted" is not "Infringing," dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As I said in the earlier story on porn... (Score:4, Insightful)
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~
Re:Choosing the most popular seeds... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's the point. If they did a proper random sample, let's say they ended up with 50% legal, 50% illegal, it wouldn't mean much if the illegal torrents accounted for 99% of the bandwidth/users.
The trouble with "peer to peer" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:... and tiny sample sizes (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Princeton Study (Score:1, Insightful)
Real classy...
pull a complete bullshit statistic out of your ass and something made up that the companies plant fake seeds in the torrents...
How exactly do you know this? Do you have any links, refrences or resources that points to the studios/companies *planting* seeds
I love how the entire thread is people just trying to dismiss these guys study
At least the guy above is actually discussing the article
Or is it more sad that people are addicted to what Hollywood puts out and they still whine/cry if it is not up to their par, yet they still give the crappie Indie music/movie scene credit and don't criticize it for its 99.9% of terrible movies it puts out.
Blah, blah, blah.... "the free model works" blah... blah... blah and the Swedish cannot produce a movie worth jack squat and America/British system still works as leading the world in what everyone wants to watch.
Like a bunch of fucking crack heads who say the drug is terrible but keep coming back for the next hit....
Re:Princeton Study (Score:5, Insightful)
You could do a study of files hosted on Rapidshare and conclude that Internet Explorer is primarily used for piracy.
When everyone is breaking the law... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Princeton Study (Score:4, Insightful)
The argument is that it's pretty damn hard to get a "random sample" form trackers, so these guys found the piratebay et al style trackers, and took "1000 MOST ACTIVE" torrents.
Why is this +5 Insightful?
Firstly, it's not even true for the study cited by the GGP, which was not weighted by number of downloads.
Secondly, surely weighting it by number of downloads would give a truer picture of the use of Bittorrent - if you found that 50% of the files available were non-infringing, but none of them had ever been downloaded, it would be disingenuous to infer that BT is a tool for legitimate content distribution.
Re:The trouble with "peer to peer" (Score:3, Insightful)
Squid [squid-cache.org] sounds kind of like what you're trying to get at. It's a web proxy for HTTP/FTP. Frequently-requested pages are cached locally, so if an ISP runs it, then they can avoid querying out to the wider Internet and avoid all the extra hops associated with that.
It could probably be extended (heck, maybe some ISP privately has, or done similar work thereof) to include the BitTorrent protocol: each torrent has a unique identifying hash, so it's theoretically possible for an ISP to monitor a swarm and cache each piece and serve it back via a proxy if traffic on a particular torrent starts to get extremely high.
Now, if you were pirating Copyrighted Movie of the Year, would you really trust your ISP to be sitting there with:
Most people probably wouldn't, even if the ISP did set it up for the pragmatic purpose of keeping their network snappy. Protocol Encryption (PE) was added to many clients primarily because of traffic-shaping ISPs, but this would give another really good reason for pirates to encrypt their streams. And if a study were to come out that suggests that an overwhelming majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of infringing content, there's an observable incentive to use PE, which would really mess with an ISP's BitTorrent proxy. (This story isn't so much a "study" as it is "silly", for reasons you only need to scroll up in the thread to find.)
USENET is the same, of course. In fact, ISPs often already do run their own NNTP servers for their customers to access, though many don't carry the alt.* hierarchy which contains a lot of the huge data files. For that, you can hit up third-party providers, and it's again up to the ISP to determine if it's worth caching via proxy, and it's up to the consumer to determine if the risk that the ISP is doing that is worth end-to-end encryption. Again, any third-party USENET provider worth their salt provides the option for SSL encryption.
There's a theme here: wherever an ISP could potentially step in and cache data a few hops closer to the user, the user has the option to encrypt traffic so that the ISP can do nothing but forward the data through, as it's pretty much useless to them.
This is a good thing, for so many reasons other than keeping pirated activity hidden, and that's why you will see the same huge data files getting transferred over the Internet multiple times over, and a contributing factor to why it might be a good idea to treat the ISPs like common carriers.
Re:Choosing the most popular seeds... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but they also didn't rule out that 50% of the bandwidth was used for legal files.
Say for example that the 1000 most popular torrents are infringing torrents and they use 1TB/s of bandwidth each.
Then you have 1000000 non-infringing torrents that only use 1GB/s each.
If their method were to be applied on this scenario they would find out that 100% of the torrents were used for copyright infringing when the reality was that less than 0.1% of the torrents and 50% of the bandwidth was used.
This is the things with statistics. It tess us exactly what was measured, any conclusion made from it is however flawed.
Re:Boo hoo hoo. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anybody pay for anything?
Indeed. Computers exist, and are getting faster, smaller, and cheaper as time goes on. High speed data lines into places of work, homes, and pockets exist.
Do you expect people not to use this stuff, especially when downloading can be more convenient than obtaining it "legally"?
The economic realities are that the tech is not going away, and humans are human. Trying to make snide comments about people pirating stuff is more of a waste of time that trying to stop the piracy!
Re:Definitively 0.3 per cent (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Princeton Study (Score:3, Insightful)
And copyright law is a couple of decades behind reality.
Admit it, copyright doesn't work. Sharing can't be stopped. Criminalizing the behavior has served no good purpose, and certainly hasn't accomplished anything. The system by which authors are compensated needs radical reform. Stop beating up on everyone for "piracy". Why? Because sharing should be legal. And then methods for sharing wouldn't automatically be suspect.
You write as if the authors and users of P2P programs were deliberately fomenting trouble. The whole point of networking is efficient sharing of data. P2P file sharing is merely a logical extension of the functionality of networking. We now have a network that is orders of magnitude more cost effective and efficient than the older ways of what basically amounts to scaled up and highly refined sneakernet. You can't seriously expect us to give up the network, for the sake of antiquated laws of highly dubious value. Nor should you seriously ask that we "play nice" and not use the network for "illegal" purposes, while doing everything possible to confuse the public, deny us our say in the laws, and make almost all networking illegal. Mickey Mouse's copyright term extension was robbery of the public on a scale to match all the alleged piracy ever committed.
When someone obtains something digitally, instead of buying it at a bricks and mortar store, they've saved us all considerable cost. The economics of moving truckloads of media from production facilities through retail outlets to thousands of individual consumers, with all the waste caused by being forced to guess what the demand might be, among the other obvious sources of waste, just can't compete with digital distribution.
Re:Funny how low it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Choosing the most popular seeds... (Score:1, Insightful)
This study doesn't rule out 99% of the bandwidth/users being legal torrents. It tells us nothing other than that the study was aimed at achieving some aim rather than reaching the truth.
Re:As I said in the earlier story on porn... (Score:1, Insightful)
I believe the point the GP was making was regarding STDs.
(Which to my mind is probably less valid than they think; as a porn star, you'd positively *need* to get checked regularly.)
Re:Gun ownership (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:As I said in the earlier story on porn... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.