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Torrentfreak blasts a 'bogus' so-called 'anti-piracy' study
A LEADING BITTORRENT website has blasted an 'anti-piracy' study recently reported by various technology news websites as being completely inaccurate as well as biased towards finding copyright infringing torrents.
It claimed websites such as Ars Technica and ZDNet were 'taken in' by a report put out by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) and pushed by the 'anti-piracy' outfit AFACT, which said that only 0.3 per cent of files available on Bittorrent were legal.
In a blog post, Torrentfreak said that the report tried to answer four questions and got them all entirely wrong due to inaccurate data and a flawed methodology.
For instance, ICSL said that there were slightly more than a million torrent files from 17 Bittorrent trackers last Spring, but this was only a small sample of what they could have looked at. Also it was biased towards the most-seeded torrents such as TV and film, leaving others badly unrepresented.
It also recorded a minimum of 117,420,061 files shared at any one time, but Torrentfreak said this was far too much as it forgot to take into account false seed counts, with the total being closer to between 10 and 20 million.
Finally Torrenttreak said that the survey just came out with false data when it came to listing the top 10 most seeded torrents, with the data being two years old and potentially from a fake Bittorrent Tracker.
Founder and editor-in-chief Ernesto said, "Here the researchers conclude that 97.9% of all files on BitTorrent are copyright infringing, and only 0.3% confirmed 'legal'. Based on our previous conclusions it is hard to believe that these figures are even remotely accurate, and they aren't.
"There are too many flaws in the methodology to list here, but for one this statistic is grossly inaccurate because it's based on the most popular files, of which many are fake.
"The researchers should have at least tried to determine the percentage of infringing files on their whole (inaccurate) dataset instead of the most seeded ones (of which many are fake).
"We're not trying to argue that the majority of the torrents are legit, but the selection of torrents and sources is extremely biased towards discovering copyright infringing torrents." µ
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I wonder if in the future where neurological science and computer interfacing with the human minds becomes more frequent - if we won't even be allowed to think about songs, because it would be piracy to replicate the entire song by thought?
It's weird to think about, but the instant the internet allowed for music to be transferred, there was instantly the existence of 'potential sales' which just somehow magically appeared to be important to record companies. I mean just imagine the legality that will be behind people even thinking about music, the way technology is advancing, why would we even buy records or CDs or even audio in general?
Sounds insane, but I bet internet piracy laws sounded insane in the 80's...
That Robert, is a legal mine field and would depend greatly on which country's laws you are covered by.
A fake file could still infringe copyright. If for instance I shared a file called "Robbie Williams - Angels.mp3", but it was really me singing it, there would still be licensing issues regarding the public performance of the song.
As for completely fake, garbage files allegedly released by the anti-p2p brigade, that could be an interesting one to see in court. I guess they could prove intent, but I would expect the punishment for intent to be lower than for actually doing something. It might even be arguable that seeding fakes is entrapment. Unfortunately the chances are the naughty p2p user is bound to have some genuine infringing material on their now seized PC, so they'll get prosecuted for that instead.
Is a fake version of a file that would be illegal breach of copyright if authentic, still illegal when it's fake?
And if so, how about when - as is alleged to happen - a fake file is transmitted by the copyright owner? Is it then legal to receive or use the fake file? Or even another file that genuinely is what the fake was supposed to be?
Also, most seeded files - won't those be the ones that are being mostlmoved around, anyway?
So most torrents are illegal? Mama mia.
For now on, I promise I won't download the ones clearly identified as such.