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Torrents: now made from 99% copyrighted material!
BitTorrent is an extraordinarily useful technology that allows for more efficient sharing of perfectly legal things like Linux distributions. Nobody's denying, though, that it's most often used to download things like Modern Warfare 2 or the latest season of Heroes. The BitTorrent census, conducted by a Princeton University senior, confirms these suspicions. It turns out that the most heavily DRM-protected content is also the most-torrented. Also, get a load of this finding: 99% of the torrents in the census were copyrighted material.The breakdown of file types reveals an interesting trend: people aren't torrenting music, which is available cheaply, reliably and DRM-free from sources including Amazon and iTunes. They're torrenting stuff like TV shows and DVDs, which are almost never made available DRM-free by legal sources. Funnily enough, most of the non-infringing content the study found was ... porn. Take the study with a grain of salt, though: it only included about 1,000 torrents, drawn from Mainline DHT.
[via Ars Technica]
Comments
13
Subscribe to commentsGardiner WestboundJan 30th 2010 12:53PM
Does anybody else hear opportunity knocking?
Make TV shows and DVDs available cheaply, reliably and DRM-free from legal sources like Amazon and iTunes and many pirating issues will go away, without lawyers and threats.
der_tuxmanJan 30th 2010 4:07PM
The industry will never understand that the internet is not their enemy.
snowy2004Jan 31st 2010 6:40PM
But, but... That would make sense! Plus, I'm sure the consumers would like that. And since when were consumers always right?
Bryan PriceJan 30th 2010 4:05PM
Unless stuff is in the public domain, it's got a copyright. Even that Linux distro you just downloaded. Even if it's Open Office. Even if it's Firefox.
@Gardiner Westbound: No geolocation issues either.
der_tuxmanJan 30th 2010 4:06PM
Linux has copyleft, not copyright. :-)
darwinsurvivorJan 30th 2010 9:40PM
@der_tuxman I'm sure you know this (detected a little sarcasm there), but for anyone else, copy-left is nothing more than a very liberal copyright agreement.
der_tuxmanJan 30th 2010 4:06PM
BitTorrent is dead anyway. eMule is the past, the present and the future. It is not, you say? Well, let's wait for the last tracker to be shut down.
BrianJan 31st 2010 10:34PM
The future is news... nevermind. I forgot the first rule.
dfgewfdsfdsfFeb 1st 2010 5:06AM
When I saw that there was a blog post about BitTorrent, I just KNEW there would be a der_tuxman comment about Emule...
der_tuxmanFeb 1st 2010 10:07AM
And I KNEW there would be useless answers to it.
CrazylinkJan 30th 2010 5:39PM
I think somebody needs to learn the definition of the word "census".
JohnnyFeb 1st 2010 1:31PM
I use torrents to watch tv shows I missed. I just don't understand if you can record them to a dvr and it's legal, why is it illegal to download it to your pc to watch?
p-diddyFeb 2nd 2010 4:06AM
Because the company that owns the copyright licensed the broadcast rights to the station you're recording it from. They didn't license it to be torrent'ed by people. Copyright gives the owner the legal RIGHT to control how COPYs are made (see what I did there?) and distributed.
Using torrents is an end run around their control, which is why the "but they're not losing money because I wouldn't buy it" argument is irrelevant - the damage is in the loss of control, not in the loss of money and why it's ok to get it from one source and not another.