Last month, the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, released a paper titled “Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US” which came to the same conclusion. To define the local piracy culture researchers conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, and they found that roughly half of all adults can be branded a pirate.

Sharing files among friends and family is the most common form of copyright infringement, and just over 13 percent of all respondents admitted to using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent to download content. File-sharing seems to be most popular among the younger demographic as can be seen in the graph below.

A section of the report that particularly piqued our interest concerns the use of tools to hide ones IP-address online. The original report shows that about 5 percent of the general population use these tools, but we expected this figure to be significantly higher among file-sharers.

The American Assembly was kind enough to share additional data with us which confirmed this suspicion. Among the people who use file-sharing software, little over 15 percent use tools to hide their IP-address online. In other words, one in 7 file-sharers in the US is anonymous.

Further analysis reveals that in particular younger adults hide their IP-addresses. A quarter of all file-sharers between the ages of 18 and 24 say they share files anonymously, while less than 5 percent of file-sharers older than 44 years hide their IP-address.

TorrentFreak talked to several VPN and proxy providers who all say they have witnessed substantial growth throughout the past year. The leading BitTorrent VPN and proxy service BTGuard even doubled its customer-base during the past 12 months.

“BTGuard has been consistently growing since we started. Compared to 2010, we increased by around 200% in 2011. The growth has really picked up lately which I contribute to SOPA and other censorship efforts,” BTGuard’s founder says.

“We grew 25% this month. If SOPA or something similar actually passes, the flood of Internet users seeking asylum from oppression would be staggering to say the least. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, the Internet is far more important to us then business.”

This uptick is not limited to the US either. All around the world BitTorrent users have become more aware of their privacy, as a survey among Pirate Bay users recently confirmed.

Although the data obtained through the American Assembly survey says nothing about people’s motivations to download anonymously, it is indeed safe to assume that the increased talk about anti-piracy laws, copyright alerts and file-sharing lawsuits are high up the list.

In the US alone over 250,000 BitTorrent users have been sued for alleged copyright infringements because their IP-address was captured by anti-piracy outfits. And in the coming year millions of sharers are expected to receive warnings through their Internet providers as part of a deal the major ISPs struck with copyright holders to educate and punish BitTorrent users.

A promising outlook for providers of VPN and proxy services, but whether these measures will have a significant effect on the prevalence of piracy remains to be seen.

Source: 15 Percent of US File-Sharers Hide Their IP-Address, More to Folllow

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators draft more sensible laws.

In just a few days 75,000 people responded and TorrentFreak was given the opportunity to share some results on the topic of anonymity. The respondents were asked whether they use services to make their BitTorrent downloads anonymous, or whether they were interested in using such services.

The results of the survey reveal that nearly 70 percent of The Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. Of this group 4.8 percent already use a paid service, while 13 percent use a free solution. Another 51.5 percent do not use an anonymizer service, but are interested in doing so in the future.

Only 18.4 percent of the respondents said they were not interested in appearing anonymous online, and the remaining 12.4 percent weren’t familiar with terms like VPN, or were undecided about their usefulness.

Looking at some of the regional differences a few interesting patterns appear.

Pirate Bay users from North America and Africa are most anonymous, 22.6 and 21.2 percent respectively. Within North America there are some striking differences as well. Only 14.7 percent of the Canadians use BitTorrent anonymously, versus 24.7 percent in Central U.S.

Within Europe there’s a great variation between the use of free and paid anonymizer services. In Russia free services (11.2%) are favored over paid services (1.9%), but in Northern Europe Pirate Bay users are more likely to use a paid (8.2%) than a free (7.7%) service.

The largest group that say they do not care about anonymity online can be found in Central and South America, with 27.8 percent. This group is the smallest in the U.S. and Oceania with 14.7 and 15.6 percent respectively.

Finally, we see that the more often people upload files themselves, the more likely they are to do so anonymously. Nearly a third of the Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizer service, versus 14 percent of the people who never upload files at all.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the vast majority of The Pirate Bay users do value anonymity, but that many of these users are currently not downloading and sharing anonymously. However, this could change at any time.

“We interpret this as a type of readiness by quite a lot of people in the file-sharing community to become more anonymous. This could happen when the risk of getting caught would increase or perceived as a more significant threat,”Stefan Larsson, co-founder and researcher at the Cybernorms research group told TorrentFreak.

There is definitely a large number of potential clients out there for proxy and VPN services, and with the increase of lawsuits and three-strikes policies this group may become even larger.

Source: The Pirate Bay Users Long for Anonymity

BTGuard does not have any bandwidth or volume restrictions, and while we briefly tested the service (from Europe), the speeds were almost equal to an unsecured connection. Setting it up is fairly easy, the only thing you need to do is enter the username and password provided by BTGuard, and you’re ready to go. Please note that this is only a proxy service, so the traffic between the user and the server is not encrypted, which means that ISPs can (potentially) still monitor it.

TorrentFreak asked one of the founders of the project why they launched the service, he told us: “More and more, people find their privacy being invaded on the Internet and we find it to be a very disturbing, unethical trend. There are some countries that still actively protect privacy, one of which is Canada.”

The BTGuard team decided to setup in Canada not only for privacy protection, but also its close network proximity to the US. “The US is experiencing a privacy invasion epidemic more so than most. ISPs are issuing disconnection notices with little regard for privacy or the accuracy of those who notified them.”

“Companies like MediaSentry collect IP addresses on P2P protocols like BitTorrent; right holders then send the IPs to your ISP. However, MediaSentry systems and techniques have no governments’ authority and are certified by no one and many institutions have received false claims. Companies like this should not be allowed to go around and make or break your Internet connection. These days, some people’s lives depend on it. This is where BTGuard comes in. The only IP companies such as MediaSentry will see is ours.”

BTGuard works differently then some other similar services like VPNOut or Smarthide. Most notably it does not VPN your entire Internet connection. You simply configure your BitTorrent client to route through their servers, so it will only effect your BitTorrent downloads. BTGuard says it has received reports that it effectively bypasses throttling but at this point they cannot confirm that it works in all cases (please let us know in the comments if it does).

BtGuard offers a free trial, and they welcome people to try it, so you can see if it’s works for you. After the trial it costs 4.75 Euro per month which is cheaper than most other services, and a small price to pay for privacy.

Source: Anonymize BitTorrent Transfers with BTGuard