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Tech News Sites Tout Misleading BitTorrent Piracy Study

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 04:38 AM PDT

A new study has been making the rounds, concluding that only 0.3% of all files available on BitTorrent are confirmed to be 'legal'. The results of the study were promoted by anti-piracy outfit AFACT and have been picked up by several news outlets, including Ars Technica and ZDNet, who all failed to see that the report is bogus.

Every so often a new study surfaces that attempts to describe the BitTorrent landscape. Yesterday a study by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) was publicized (pdf) and the researchers found that only 0.3% of all torrents were confirmed legal. Good enough for a catchy headline, but how accurate is the study really?

Unfortunately, the results of these type of studies are pushed by anti-piracy outfits and taken for granted by outsiders, even by respected news outlets on the Internet such as Ars Technica and ZDNet. In this case their reporters were completely taken in by the report.

Just a few minutes into reading the study we were shaking our heads here at the TorrentFreak headquarters. Mistake after mistake is made in the report and conclusions are drawn based on painfully inaccurate data and methodologies. We’ll lay out the most critical errors below, which represent just the tip of the iceberg.

The study aims to answer four questions. We will state each question and indicate what’s wrong with the answers.

1. How many files are shared using BitTorrent and what are the categories of shared files?

ICSL claims that there are slightly more than a million torrent files to be found online, according to data obtained from 17 BitTorrent trackers this spring. They further come up with an overview of categories where applications account for 2.3% of all torrents, while movies and TV-shows are good for more than 70%.

Both conclusions are horribly wrong.

We’re not sure how the researchers came up with the one million torrents because the OpenBitTorrent tracker, which is included in their sample, reports it has 2,5 million torrents alone. In addition, sites such as isoHunt index over 5 million unique torrents. Needless to say, ICSL’s data collection methods are far from accurate.

An even bigger flaw is found in the categorization process. The categories are not based on the entire set of torrents, but only on the most-seeded ones, which heavily skews the data. Books and applications generally have a lower seed count than movie and TV-shows which means that they are underrepresented in the category overview.

2. At a given point in time, how much sharing of files is actually occurring using BitTorrent?

“For the trackers that we scraped, we recorded a minimum of 117,420,061 current seeds. This value is calculated by determining the highest available seeder count for each torrent from any tracker that was scraped,” the researchers answer in their report.

Again this is figure is bogus, but this time it’s wrong on the other end of the scale. As will become clear later in our analysis, the researchers have made a critical mistake by including various trackers that report false seed counts. We had to chuckle when we saw 2-year-old torrents with more than a million seeders in their report. The real seed count at any given time lies between 10 and 20 million.

3. For each shared file, how many times has it been shared in total?

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. As noted before, 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.

Top 10 of Fake Torrents?

seed

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.

4. Overall, what is the number and percentage of shared files which are infringing, both by number of files and total downloads?

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.

To back this up, we only have to take a look at isoHunt. According to isoHunt their site indexes 5,451,959 unique torrent files, and 85,457 of these come from Jamendo, a site that publishes only Creative Commons licensed music. So that’s already 1.5% torrents that can be shared legally, without mentioning any Linux distros.

Bottom line is that this ‘Academic’ paper is one of the most inaccurate reports we’ve seen thus far, and the mainstream tech media either didn’t spend long reading the report or simply didn’t have the specialist knowledge to read the results and come to their own conclusions. Even worse, the Australian anti-piracy outfit AFACT will probably use this ‘credible’ report in court to convince the court that the local ISP iiNet responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers.

Let’s hope that Ars and others will update their reports accordingly.

We’ve contacted Paul Watters, one of the researchers, for a comment but haven’t heard back from him yet.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

‘Yes Men’ Use BitTorrent To Avoid Censorship

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 06:42 AM PDT

The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo who expose the lies and social problems caused by governments and corporations. In their much awarded films they impersonate people in power to bring out the truth. Because the US Chamber of Commerce is suing their asses, they have now turned to BitTorrent to get their message out.

With millions of daily users BitTorrent is a great outlet for filmmakers to promote their work, but there are more advantages to this 21st century distribution platform. After their first film turned into a huge success, The Yes Men don’t have to worry too much about promotion. However, it is still much-needed to avoid censorship from governments and corporations and to raise funds for future endeavors.

In 2009 The Yes Men hijacked a United States Chamber of Commerce press conference, declaring a U-turn on their climate change policy. In a response to this “identity correction” the Chamber filed a lawsuit against the duo, claiming that they misled the public. Due to this legal battle no TV-station wants to take the risk to run some of the most controversial material, so The Yes Men took matters into their own hands by releasing an updated P2P-edition of their latest film today.

In addition to avoiding censorship, The Yes Men are looking for donations to fund their upcoming projects. This is where the BitTorrent-powered distribution platform VODO comes in. With free promotion from uTorrent, Limewire and a variety of prominent torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and EZTV, this release will instantly have an audience of millions of downloaders.

To find out more about their motivation to get the film out on BitTorrent and to find out whether they were also this excited about BitTorrent when their first film was pirated by more than a million people, we caught up with Mike Bonanno, one half of The Yes Men.

“There are a few reasons why we chose BitTorrent. First off, it’s a way to avoid censorship,” Mike Bonanno told TorrentFreak. “This version includes video of an action against the US Chamber of Commerce that we are being sued for. No commercial outlets will touch it. We had a TV show scheduled on Planet Green and their lawyers nearly wet themselves when they heard we wanted to use footage of us making political mince-meant out of the largest lobbying organization in the world.”

Yes Men Fix the World

yes men

“It’s unlikely that anyone would distribute this material before we get out of court,” Bonanno continued. “But we don’t want them to win a de-facto censorship case, so P2P is a great workaround. Another reason we are doing this is because this is the way people see movies these days, and we made this movie for people to see it. We would love it if people bought our DVD, but we also want people who don’t do that to see it. And last of all: we do hope to generate some donations: we are broke and there are not so many funders for our new project, especially given that they are all spooked by lawsuits, no matter how stupid!”

Although the benefits of BitTorrent are clear in this case, The Yes Men’s previous film was also pirated by more than a million people. When we asked Mike Bonanno how he felt about this we found out that he’s more upset about the stranglehold that the ‘copyright mafia’ puts on indie productions than the people who grab a copy of their movie on BitTorrent.

“It’s great that people are watching our films! We are very happy that they are getting seen. But that having been said, we do wish that a few more people were paying for it. We borrowed a shit-load of money from friends to make our latest movie and we still can’t pay them back. Also, the way the industry is set up, if you want your stuff on TV or delivered through any official channels you have to spend a massive amount of money clearing rights and paying for legal stuff and that is just silly.”

“For us to get our ‘errors and omissions insurance’ required for any distributor to take it, we had to clear the rights on all sorts of stuff we should not really have had to… including music written in the 17th century, which apparently because of some kind of law in Austria was not public domain according to the interpretation of insurance industry lawyers! Anyway, that’s just one example… so what happens as a film maker – especially a documentary maker – is that in today’s market we are fucked.”

“Because to get it on TV we still need to act like we have deep pockets and can pay for rights for all sorts of shit, but then with the collapse of the indy film market distributors won’t pay for it. And of course most people file-share it rather than pay for it. So yeah, we are happy that people are watching it but not so happy that we are financially screwed! But we also see that it’s the system that is screwing us: we are not blaming the pirates, we are blaming casino capitalism!”

This comment from Bonanno led us to ask the question whether The Yes Men would ever consider exposing the ‘copyright mafia’ and anti-piracy groups. These outfits have turned copyright into a cash cow while pretending to protect the rights of artists, something we address here on TorrentFreak every week. As it turns out, The Yes Men are siding with us in this regard.

“I think in some ways most of our work is about targeting ideas about the rule of private property… so this is related,” Bonanno said. “Our first four years as The Yes Men was dedicated to attacking the World Trade Organization, which has historically supported the idea of proprietary media. Overall, I think that in some ways everything today, every major issue facing us can be seen through the lens of what role it plays in the commons… or lack thereof, as many a government and corporation would have it.”

“If copyright was actually working the way it was supposed to, and protecting the authors that would be great. But that’s not how it works anymore – it just protects money; whoever has the most of it. And usually that means that the authors are fucked anyway!”

The Peer-to-Peer edition of The Yes Men Fix The World is now available for free on VODO. To spread their knowledge The Yes Men have started The Yes Lab, which is also worth checking out. Lastly, don’t forget to donate a few bucks if you like what you see.

‘Yes Men’ Clip that leaked Earlier (audience camera)

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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