Current Bittorrent report

[Gindil]

TLDR version at the bottom.

Alright, if you don't know about BT, google is your friend. What I'm going to do here is put up a two links, one showing a horrible biased opinion against Bittorrent information, then I'm going to debunk it with the second one.

We pillage the fine booty of free films [http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/arrr-we-pillage-a-fine-booty-of-free-films-20101210-18svm.html]

THE scale of global digital piracy has been revealed in new research by a team at the University of Ballarat that found the action-comedy film Kick-Ass was downloaded more than 323,000 times in one week in July - three weeks before it was released on DVD.

The study was conducted by researchers at the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, which works with federal police and copyright holders to find ways of tracking and preventing copyright theft.

Doubt that about Kick-Ass, but let's proceed:

Digital piracy is growing in Australia. A 2009 study for the Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation found 53 per cent of Australians had been involved in an act of piracy. The definition included bringing in a pirated DVD from overseas, illegal downloading, or burning a copy of a rented or purchased disc for friends. In 2005, the figure was just 23 per cent.

If you bring in a DVD from overseas, doesn't that mean you bought the movie and own it from that location? And I'm not familiar with burning a copy, but how the hell do you track giving one to a friend?

The most recent analysis in 2005 put losses to the Australian film and video/DVD sector at $230 million a year. Since then, broadband penetration and speed has increased exponentially, and it's reasonable to assume losses have too.

Great, pull more numbers out of your ass for us. *thumbs up*

''During the Pirate Bay [a Swedish torrent site] trial, the defendants argued that 80 per cent of torrents were legal,'' the authors write. ''Even giving the benefit of the doubt to some terms, we found that 97 per cent of downloads in our sample were for infringing content.''

There's no link to their methodology, merely "because we said so".

New technologies being developed by BitTorrent sites ''can reduce and possibly eliminate the need for trackers [Bit-Torrent servers], thus removing the main source of data used in this research,'' the authors write.

Torrents no longer Need tracking [http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-one-year-after-the-tracker-shut-down-101117/]

In that case, they add, ''it will become more difficult to examine the extent of infringing, and in some cases criminal, content sharing in the future''.

Notice how consumers are criminals? It's subtle but it's there.

However, copyright holders may take some small solace from separate research by social networking site habbo.com that found Australian teenagers are among the least likely in the world to download music and movies illegally.

HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

TOP 10 ILLEGAL MOVIE DOWNLOADS
- Kick-Ass (2010)
-The Wolfman (2010)
-Wanted (2008)
-Hancock (2008)
-Step Brothers (2008)
-Juno (2007)
-Gladiator (2000)
-Toy Story (1995)
-Hum Tum Aur Ghost (2010)
-She?s Out Of My League (2010)

... This just came out recently, and yet they're using some old movies for downloads. I mean, seriously? Toy Story 1 and not Toy Story 3?

Read the entire thing. I'll wait...
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...

Done? Okay, the true rebuttal with scientific data.

Link [http://torrentfreak.com/incompetent-bittorrent-researchers-strike-again-101211/]

Over the past years we?ve seen dozens of BitTorrent and piracy studies that were not the most robust or accurate, but the reports from the University of Ballarat?s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory top them all. Among other painful mistakes, the researchers conclude that older films such as Gladiator, Juno and Hancock were among the 10 most downloaded films this summer, years after they came out.

1. Most downloaded files
The data collected for the new study was gathered in July 2010, and the researchers used the number of active seeders at the time to determine what files are ?most downloaded?. One would assume that such a list would be dominated by new titles, but according to the Australian researchers this is not the case.

In their top 10 most downloaded (read ?seeded?) movies, we find the following titles that have been available for years:

Wanted (2008)
Hancock (2008)
Juno (2007)
Step Brothers (2008)
Gladiator (2000)
Toy Story (1995)

*thumbs up*

3. Multiplying Trackers
The last point that we want to address is again an illustration of the incompetence of the researchers. What we missed last time is that they simply added up the reports of the different BitTorrent trackers they scraped. If ?torrent A? is tracked by 5 individual trackers, then the researchers add up the seeder counts of them all, while in fact they are often used by the same downloaders.

*thumbs up*

Sadly enough we have to conclude that this new study is just as bad as the previous one, and totally unusable to describe the BitTorrent landscape. We?re not exaggerating if we say that the researchers are incompetent, lack common sense, and are too stubborn to take advice when we offered it.

You ain't the only one. But at least there's someone that knows what to do to correct egregious errors of the copyright maximalists out there.

TLDR - The newest report on piracy is heavily skewed towards the people that look to gain from more laws. The actual thing that is happening is that they barely explain what is going on with piracy and are so wrong that you do need a second opinion.