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BitTorrent

Princeton University student Sauhard Sahi and Professor Ed Felten did an interesting survey on which kind of files are available on BitTorrent. Where Sauhard chose a random sample of 1,021 files from the trackerless Mainline DHT and classified them by file type, language, and apparent copyright status. He discovered that nearly half (46 percent) of files were nonpornographic movies and TV shows—the largest single category of content. 14 percent of the files were porn and 14 percent files were of games and software. Just 10 percent of the files were classified as music, and one percent were books and guides.

But the very amazing thing he found was about whether these files were infringement or non-infringement. So this is what he found out, 100 percent of the movie/TV show sample was found to be infringing, along with all of the music torrents. Seven of the 148 files in games/software were found to be non-infringing (two were Linux distros), and one of the 145 porn files was given the benefit of the doubt as non-infringing. Overall, about one percent of the total files were categorized as “likely noninfringing.”

Sauhard Sahi and Ed Felten explains -

Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately 1%, as likely non-infringing, This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded. Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users.

This should not be surprising to many people, but it is nice to see that this kind of work was done on a scientific level. They should further do a study into the amount of files being spiked by the distributors and their agents with malware. That would be even more interesting.

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