The paper carries the self-explanatory title “Associating Depressive Symptoms in College Students with Internet Usage Using Real Internet Data” and will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

In brief, the researchers monitored how 216 undergraduates at Missouri S&T used the campus network. They then linked these findings to the results of a self-rated depression scale (CES-D survey).

What they found was that the use of peer-to-peer octets, packets and duration is positively correlated with depressive symptoms. In other words, people who are “depressed” are more avid file-sharers than those who don’t show depressive symptoms.

According to lead researcher Dr. Sriram Chellappan, the findings are unique among their kind.

“The study is believed to be the first that uses actual Internet data, collected unobtrusively and anonymously, to associate Internet usage with signs of depression,” he told Psys. “Previous research on Internet usage has relied on surveys, which are ‘a far less accurate way’ of assessing how people use the Internet.”

It is unclear what the direction of the relation between depressive symptoms and file-sharing is. The MPAA and RIAA may use the results to claim that file-sharing is bad for your mental health, but this can’t be concluded from the current findings.

Aside from heavy P2P use, people with depressive symptoms also use online chat more, and spend more time sending email. HTTP traffic and streaming were not correlated to depressive symptoms.

As a category file-sharers are in good company as previous studies have linked depressive symptoms to online shopping, excessive online video viewing, social networking, online gambling, and excessive late-night Internet use.

Where things do get scary is when Dr. Sriram Chellappan suggests that it might be a good idea to develop applications that scan people’s Internet use for these risky behaviors.

“The software would be a cost-effective and an in-home tool that could proactively prompt users to seek medical help if their Internet usage patterns indicate possible depression. The software could also be installed on campus networks to notify counselors of students whose Internet usage patterns are indicative of depressive behavior,” he explains.

This goes a bit too far, and is also uncalled for as there is absolutely no evidence that even a decent percentage of all avid P2P users show depressive symptoms.

That a researcher even suggests this is baffling. Not everything has to be monitored and checked. Most people just want their monthly invoice from their ISP, not a complete mental health report. Or perhaps i’m just being far too negative…

Source: File-Sharing Is Linked to Depression, Researchers Find

None of these researchers, however, used a large sample of accurate download statistics from a BitTorrent tracker to examine this topic. This missing element motivated economist Robert Hammond, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, to conduct his own research.

In a paper titled “Profit Leak? Pre-Release File Sharing and the Music Industry” Hammond published his findings.

Between May 2010 and January 2011 the professor collected a variety of download statistics of new albums that were released on the largest private BitTorrent tracker dedicated to music. He then used this data in combination with sales numbers to construct a model that predicts what the causal effect of piracy on music sales is.

The results are unique in its kind and reveal that BitTorrent piracy causes an increase in album sales.

“I isolate the causal effect of file sharing of an album on its sales by exploiting exogenous variation in how widely available the album was prior to its official release date. The findings suggest that file sharing of an album benefits its sales. I don’t find any evidence of a negative effect in any specification, using any instrument,” Hammond concludes in his paper.

In total the sample includes 1,095 albums from 1,075 artists. The research focuses on albums that leaked before their official release. The music industry often states that “curbing pre-release piracy is a particular priority for the recording industry.” These releases are also the focus of criminal proceedings against pirate sites both in the US and the UK.

However, according to the research, sales may actually be hurt by going after these sites. Hammond’s findings suggest that piracy itself acts as a form of advertising similar to radio play and media campaigns, where more downloads result in a moderate increase in sales.

That said, the effect described in the paper is a moderate one. Taking all factors into account Hammond finds that an album that leaks a month in advance results in 59.6 additional sales.

To some degree the results are surprising, as other studies have found a negative relation between music piracy and sales. However, Hammond notes that none of these studies had access to such detailed and precise download statistics which make it possible to go beyond the usual correlation.

Also, unlike several other studies, Hammond’s focuses on album releases instead of single songs.

“I focus on how file sharing of an individual album helps or hurts that album’s sales. The question of interest here is whether an individual artist should expect her sales to decline given wider pre-release availability of the album in file-sharing networks. I find that the answer is no.”

Another unique finding reported in the paper is that popular artists profit more from piracy than less established acts. For smaller artists there is no effect of pre-release piracy on sales. This contradicts older research. Hammond, however, notes that his data is richer than in the other studies, and therefore more accurate.

In addition, we’d argue that the focus on pre-releases may also account for the missing effect on new artists.

While the reported data appears to be solid, the question has to be asked how representative the data set is for all music piracy on BitTorrent. The private tracker in question has more than 150,000 users, who are almost exclusively more than average music fans.

Overall, the paper offers a unique and unprecedented analysis of BitTorrent piracy on music sales. It clearly disputes the music industry argument that pre-release piracy hurts album sales, and suggests that BitTorrent piracy can act as promotion.

Source: BitTorrent Piracy Boosts Music Sales, Study Finds

The notorious BitTorrent site is encouraging visitors to take part in the survey into people’s file-sharing habits and their views on copyright enforcement. The study is a follow up to a similar survey last year, in which 75,000 people from all over the world participated.

One of the main goals of the project is to counter entertainment industry propaganda. The researchers want to document how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are, or should be, reflected in relevant legislation.

“This research is first of all aiming at creating a better base of knowledge for policy makers. Without adequate information it is impossible to adapt the legal systems in a legitimate way,” Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law at Lund and study manager told TorrentFreak.

“Further, this research is important as a counterweight to the propaganda produced by various actors. Through the follow-up survey we are able to register changes and trends; and also we have the opportunity to ask some new questions, for example related to the recent demands on UK ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.”

Svensson told TorrentFreak that the Pirate Bay is the perfect partner to carry out this type of research.

Among other things, the first study revealed that Pirate Bay users show a great interest in VPN services and other anonymizers. With this second survey the Cybernorms group wants to see how the findings of the first study developed over time.

“We are very curious of how the use of anonymity services has developed during the last year. A survey conducted earlier this year in Sweden indicated a growing use among file sharers of VPN services for anonymization. We think that we have reason to believe that intensified enforcement strategies will accelerate this development,” Svensson said.

In addition, the survey also give the researchers the opportunity to delve deeper in people’s responses to recent Pirate Bay blockades, such as the one that was ordered in the UK last week.

“We are also curious to learn more about the specific techniques used for online anonymity and the techniques for avoiding blocking. This time we are breaking down the data on a national level which means that we will be able to compare legal strategies with the actual behavioral changes.”

Svensson stresses that he and his colleagues have a responsibility as social scientists to monitor the responses to more repressive anti-piracy laws. Thus far this has resulted in a few interesting insights. For example, they found that changing the law doesn’t mean that people’s norms will change.

Instead, the gap between law and file-sharer’s morals widens.

“Our research has shown that tougher legislation actually does have an effect on the amount that people file share copyright protected media. However, this legislation has no effect on the social norms of society,” Svensson said.

“People still don’t think it is wrong to share files. What we have is a deterrent effect due to enforcement actions, but an effect that lacks societal support. This is a dangerous development that in the long run risks undermining the trust in the democratic society.”

Readers who want to help out with the research are invited to take part in the survey. Next week all results of the first survey will be published to the public.

Source: The Pirate Bay Partners With Academic Researchers to Counter Propaganda

The above is just one of the many examples which show that there are many positive sides to the act of ‘copying’. Despite these nuances, piracy is often referred to as theft. This is a problem according to Stefan Larsson, lawyer and socio-legal researcher at Lund University in Sweden.

Larsson addresses the issue in his thesis “Metaphors and Norms – Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society,” for which he just received his doctorate. Talking to TorrentFreak, he explains why copyright infringement isn’t theft, and how this problematic metaphor keeps the gap between public norms and the law intact.

“The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied. There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike,” Larsson explains.

One of the obvious problems is that it suggests that every “stolen copy” is a lost sale.

“Following this conception, some iPods could be valued at millions of dollars and a file sharing service could aid in copyright infringements representing more value than the Gross Domestic Product of entire countries,” Larsson says.

And indeed, if we look at the court case against The Pirate Bay in Sweden, the renumeration model of the entertainment industry would mistakenly put the “value” of the site at billions of dollars.

“I think that one important aspect lies in that the legal regulation is built on fundamentally different conceptions of reality,” Larsson told TorrentFreak.

The researcher explains that the public perception of the law, or social norms, is out of line with what the law actually says. In part this is because the “theft” metaphor is built into law, while there is no such thing as theft where piracy is concerned.

“In other words, this means that legal concepts can become metaphorical if their meaning expands into new areas, and the fixed conceptions that once ensured their legitimacy may seem unjust in the eyes of a reality that has moved on. This supports the gap between legal and social norms regarding parts of copyright today.”

This gap between the law and what people see, feel and experience in real life is a problem, one that lawmakers are now trying to address with even more draconian laws based on the same nonsense metaphors.

But are tougher laws the best solution? Will these change people’s norms? Larsson is not convinced.

“There are naturally many examples of when tougher laws change behavior, and there are also even examples of when tougher laws have made a substantial contribution in changing social norms. However, there are a few possible drawbacks when law turns repressive.”

He explains that these laws “would need to make everyone think differently about reality,” something that’s easier said than done. Another problem according to Larsson is that may people will simply find ways to hide what they do, such as using VPN services or proxies when downloading via BitTorrent.

Larsson doesn’t think that the current trends of stronger copyright laws and more surveillance of Internet users is the right path to take. These measures often violate the rights of the masses to benefit the interests of a few, which can never be a good solution.

Instead of changing people’s norms and twisting reality, perhaps society might be better off when copyright law adapts to the digital age?

Source: Piracy is NOT Theft: Problems of a Nonsense Metaphor

The European Strategy: Send Money to the US

Most of the time, the international politics of intellectual property law are pretty easy to follow: countries that are large exporters of intellectual property usually favor stronger international IP agreements that help exploit international markets.  Countries that are large importers of IP, in contrast, generally favor lower levels of IP protection that minimize the outflow of royalties, licensing fees, and other payments for foreign-owned products and technologies–whether computers, drugs, movies, or books.  Whatever other rhetorics are in play, from the rights of authors to the right to development, political positions usually line up with those underlying incentives.

The turn toward the use of trade agreements to set IP obligations–from the early bilateral agreements of the 1980s to the WTO’s TRIPS agreement in the early 1990s–more or less formalized this instrumental approach to IP law.  Trade agreements, at the end of the day, are about economic deals–not morality or even fairness.  For anyone clinging to a moral interpretation of these arrangements, it’s worth revisiting at the US and EU positions in the South African AIDS drug controversy from the late 1990s or more recent opposition to the proposed WIPO treaty for the visually impaired.

I raise this not to attack trade agreements, but to ask some similarly instrumental questions about the European Commission’s position on IP rights and enforcement.  Over the past two decades, the EC has been a very active proponent of higher IP standards and stronger enforcement, from the ACTA agreement, to the upcoming revision to the Enforcement Directive, to the imminent extension of copyright on recordings (see here).  Let’s ask the obvious question: why?

Follow the Money

I’ll focus on audiovisual markets and piracy, since these are driving the EC and wider EU push on enforcement.  Media piracy–not counterfeits–are why we’re talking about major changes to the emerging digital architecture of public life, including Internet surveillance, ’3-strikes’ disconnection laws, public and private censorship of websites, and a host of other measures.

So where do the EU’s economic interests lie?  Let’s look at the numbers:

*** According to the World Bank, Europe’s audiovisual imports exceed its exports by a ratio of around 4-1.  In 2008, Europe (EU 27) imported roughly $14.7 billion in audiovisual and related services (basically, licenses for movies, TV, radio, and sound recording).  In contrast, it exported about $3.9 billion, for a net trade deficit of $10.8 billion  (International Trade Statistics 2010: 156).

*** About 56% of those imports ($8.35 billion) come from the US.  The EU, in turn, exports about $1.7 billion to the US, resulting in a net negative trade balance of around $6.65 billion.  This does not include software licenses, where US companies monopolize larger parts of the European consumer and business markets.

*** The US, in contrast, is a large net exporter of audiovisual goods, with roughly $13.6 billion in exports and $1.9 billion in imports.

For countries or regions that are net importers of copyrighted goods, higher IP standards and stronger enforcement will result in increased payments to foreign rights holders.  Because the US thoroughly dominates European audiovisual markets, stronger enforcement in these areas is, in practice, enforcement on behalf of Hollywood.

Now, one can make this story more complicated.  The vast majority of European audiovisual production is for domestic or intra-European consumption.  Exports from European countries to each other significantly outweigh exports outside the EU (by about 50%).  Won’t stronger IP laws and enforcement capture more benefits for European industry?  Probably, but these should not be confused with overall benefits to the European economy.

Here’s how we put it in our Media Piracy report:

Domestic piracy may well impose losses on specific industrial sectors, but these are not losses to the larger national economy. Within a given country [or in this case, region], the piracy of domestic goods is a transfer of income, not a loss. Money saved by consumers or businesses on CDs, DVDs, or software will not disappear but rather be spent on other things—housing, food, other entertainment, other business expenses, and so on. These expenditures, in turn, will generate tax revenue, new jobs, infrastructural investments, and the range of other goods that are typically cited in the loss column of industry analyses.

To make a case for national economic harms rather than narrower sectoral ones, the potential uses of lost revenue need to be compared: the foregone investment in the affected industries needs to represent a better potential economic outcome than the consumer surplus generated by piracy (Sanchez 2008). The net impact on the economy, properly understood, is the difference between the value of the two investments. Such comparisons lead into very complicated territory as marginal investments in different industries generate different contributions to growth and productivity. There has been no serious analysis of this issue, however, because the industry studies have ignored the consumer surplus, maintaining the fiction that domestic piracy represents an undiluted national economic loss.

For our part, we take seriously the possibility that the consumer surplus from piracy might be more productive, socially valuable, and/or job creating than additional investment in the software and media sectors. We think this likelihood increases in markets for entertainment goods, which contribute to growth but add little to productivity, and still further in countries that import most of their audiovisual goods and software—in short, virtually everywhere outside the United States.

The EC clearly speaks for the European audiovisual industries on these issues, who stand, in theory, to gain from stronger IP enforcement (or maybe not!).  But who speaks for the massive and very real consumer surplus?  No one.  I’m aware of only one study that makes any effort to model it: the Dutch government funded “Ups and Downs: Economic and Cultural Effects of File Sharing on Music, Film and Games,” which estimated the annual welfare benefit from music filesharing in the Netherlands at around 100 million euros.  Multiply by 30 for a very crude extrapolation of this benefit across the EU.

Whose Piracy is It?

But to what extent does piracy actually impact European movies?  For better and for worse, the answer appears to be: very little.  Ernesto at TorrentFreak  regularly compiles lists of the top ten films downloaded via BitTorrent, which generally track recent Hollywood hits.  He generously furnished me a ranking of the 99 top downloaded movies for the first half of July (99 because the top 100 included Thor under two different titles).  Although not a rigorous sample, I’d suggest that it is  a decent proxy for the global demand for film.  Among these 99 films:

*** 74 were solely US productions
*** 3 were solely European productions
*** 3 were Indian productions
*** 17 were jointly produced by the US and one or more other countries, including 14 with European companies.
*** UK production companies were solely responsible for 2 films, and partnered in 11 more.
*** German companies co-produced 4 films.
*** Canadian companies co-produced 3 films.
*** South African and New Zealand companies were sole producers of 1 film each. Japan and Romania co-produced 1 each.

French production is an interesting case given the leading French role in promoting both strong IP protection and Europeanist cultural politics–including the well known ‘cultural exception’ for trade in audiovisual goods and services.  French companies figure in only 4 films on the list—and in no cases for movies filmed in France, in French, or prominently involving French actors or filmmakers. The No.1 film on the list, Source Code, was co-produced by Vendome Pictures–a relatively new French production company dedicated to producing, by all appearances, American movies.  Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal and was filmed in Chicago.

Another feature of this list is that 97 of 99 of the films are in English (the two non-English films are Indian).  The list makes a strong case that, in the absence of licensing barriers, the international market is an English language market and more particularly a Hollywood market that occasionally involves foreign production partners.

Even the long tail (down to #99 at least) isn’t European.  For the most part, it’s composed of the Hollywood movies from the last year that you’ve never heard of: the Kevin Bacon filmElephant White; the girl surfer/shark attack/Dennis Quaid movie Soul Surfer; the Russel Crowe/Elizabeth Banks film, The Next Three Days; the Topher Grace/Anna Faris flick, Take Me Home Tonight, and many others. According to the MPAA, 677 film were produced by US production companies in 2009.  That’s a lot of movies that go straight to the back catalog! And even that number is well off the peak of 2006-2007.

Is this the sign of a European cinema in decline?   Not if we look at the number of feature films produced, which should certainly factor into any account of piracy’s effects on incentives to produce.  The number of feature films produced in Europe has increased every year in the last five.  Almost 1200 were produced in 2009.

[The blue part of the chart is the percentage of a film's total audience that it receives in its home country (vs. the rest of Europe). Source]

Some of this insularism reflects linguistic and cultural differences within Europe.  And some of it reflects the fragmentation of the European market.  The burden of rights clearance across 27 countries and innumerable production companies makes it very difficult to distribute European films widely within Europe–and far more difficult, in particular, than licensing large catalogs from the six US studios.  The EC has made reducing these market barriers a high priority, but has shown less certainty about how to move forward.  As EC reports have noted:

The practice of territorial licensing has a lot to do with commercial decisions based on the structure of a European market that is characterised by linguistic and cultural differences, as well as by high transaction costs in distributing local content across borders. (p.185)

In other words, it’s not clear where the market obstacles stop and the mismatch of product with demand begins.

Here, our list of downloaded films points to the future–and to the main dilemma facing European cultural policy.  The emergence of a more unified audiovisual market suits both the political project of European unity and the culturalist project of making more European productions available to more Europeans.  Given the current constraints, lower barriers to licensing will certainly increase the range of European offerings to European consumers.

But there’s a catch: so far, the European market and–beyond that–the global market, has had little to do with expressions of cultural specificity or auteur-driven visions.  It has to do, above all, with making films in English that minimize those particularities.  It means producing a Europe built around historical epics (Ironclad), sci-fi/fantasy (Inception, Harry Potter) or, often quite literally, the perspective of the universal (American) tourist, like last year’s The Tourist (Johnny Depp in Venice) or Unknown (Liam Neeson in Berlin).

All of the above were joint US/EU productions on our July download list.  And it means a European film industry reorganized further into an investment vehicle for Hollywood movies, like Vendome Pictures, the now defunct publicly-funded Medienfonds in Germany (Battlefield Earth,Terminator 3), or Luc Besson’s massive, soon-to-be opened Cite du Cinema north of Paris.

My goal is not to make an anti-Hollywood argument here.  There are pros and cons to this system of public subsides, and greater integration into the global market might be, on balance, a good thing in business and cinematic terms. But it is important to be clear about the future that the EC is promoting with its IP policies.  It is not a defense of European heritage or–primarily–a vision of the French auteur able to bring his or her distinctive vision to a global audience. It’s a vision of European production companies  as slightly better integrated junior partners in global Hollywood.

It’s this junior partnership that should be weighed against the wider sacrifices of privacy and freedom of speech built into so many recent national and EC-level IP enforcement policies, such as the French ’3-strikes’ plan, which will cut French citizens off of the Internet for the piracy of Hollywood productions.  Strong enforcement reinforces status quo positions in the market, but at an escalating public cost as consumer behavior becomes the real focus of enforcement activities.  There is nothing in these policies will alter the balance of cultural power or change the direction of payments.  That’s why I’ve characterized the EC enforcement plan as: “send money to the US.”

Moralizing IP rhetoric is also a handicap in this context.  Continuing to defend IP as a fundamental right long after it has been made an object of trade policy is to surrender any real leverage in making deals.  A trade negotiator would be very lucky have such a partner on the other side of the table.  Where could Hollywood find such a partner?

How the European Commission Took Up the Cause of Hollywood

I know and understand that our french conception of author’s rights isn’t the same as in the United States or other countries.  I simply want to say that we hold to the universal principles proclaimed in the American constitution as much as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789: that no one should have the product of their ideas, work, imagination–their intellectual property–expropriated with impunity.

Each of you understands what I say here because each of you is also a creator, and it is in virtue of these creator’s rights that you have founded businesses that today have become empires.  The algorithms that give you your strength; this constant innovation that is your force; this technology that changes the world is your property, and nobody contests it.  Each of you, each of us, can thus understand that the writer, the director, or the performer can have the same rights. – French President Sarkozy, opening the ‘e-G8? conference that he convened this past April.

With this fulsome praise of tech and media CEOs at the e-G8, Sarkozy expressed the basic European cognitive dissonance on IP:  the embrace of universal rights as a way of pretending equality with the real powers in the room.  More cynically, it is the embrace of the foreign agenda as a way of rewarding the local junior partners.  Indigenous elites used to play this game with the French back when they had the empire.

How did Europe get here?  Tellingly, there was initially little European enthusiasm for a broad trade agreement on IP in the 1980s.  By most accounts, lobbying by US tech and pharmaceutical industries made the difference, capitalizing on a wider overestimation of–and nostalgia for–Europe’s role as a cultural superpower, when it was the primary beneficiary of stronger international IP laws.  More narrowly, the European Commission’s IP activism can be traced to the actions of a handful of American CEOs, who convinced their European counterparts of the benefits of a global IP deal in the run-up to the WTO agreement in the 1980s.   Those counterparts, in turn, applied pressure on their national governments and, through them, the EC.

This gambit has been described in several histories of the WTO negotiations, including Peter Drahos and John Braithewaite’s excellent Information Feudalism.

EC bureaucrats were less keen on trying to harmonize intellectual property standards via the trade regime. They had had some experience of the difficulties of trying to harmonize intellectual property standards in Europe. Some states, such as Germany and the UK, were keen on higher standards while others, such as Spain and Italy, were not so inclined. The view coming out of the EC at this time was to press on with the initiative on counterfeiting in the GATT (a lot of luxury European trade marks were the subject of counterfeiting) and make a general IP code a much longer-term priority….

The problem facing Pratt and Opel [Edmund Pratt, CEO of Pfizer and John Opel, Chairman of IBM] was clear enough. They had to convince business organizations in Quad countries [the US, the EU countries, Japan, and Canada] to pressure their governments to include intellectual property in the next round of trade negotiations. That meant first convincing European and Japanese business that it was in their interests for intellectual property to become a priority issue in the next trade round…..

Pratt and Opel’ s response was swift. In March 1986 they created the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC).24  The IPC was an ad hoc coalition of 13 major US corporations: Bristol-Myers, DuPont, FMC Corporation, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Monsanto, Pfizer, Rockwell International and Warner Communications. It described itself as ‘dedicated to the negotiation of a comprehensive agreement on intellectual property in the current GATT round of multilateral trade negotiations’ (pp.117- 118) ….

Enrolling European business in the network was the essential first step for the IPC… The IPC had established a line of dialogue with the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE) in November 1986. It proved vital. In Europe’ s more hierarchically ordered world of business lobbying, UNICE was the key portal of European business influence on the EC. During 1986 and 1987 close cooperation developed between UNICE representatives and EC officials; UNICE was given the opportunity to comment on the EC’ s negotiating position and drafts. In May 1987 UNICE produced its own position paper on GATT and intellectual property arguing that the EC’ s approach was ‘deemed too narrow by European industry’ and that the ‘scope of the negotiations must be broadened’ to include other areas of intellectual property where European industry was making heavy R&D investments.  In the following months this became the position of European Community negotiators (p.128)….

Perhaps what US CEOs were able to sell to their European and Japanese counterparts was a vision of a globally secure business future. Ultimately, US corporations might do best out of the globalization of intellectual property standards. A world in which US corporations were dominant but European and Japanese corporations still remained powerful players and strategic partners was preferable to a world in which corporations from all these countries faced competition from increasingly efficient developing country manufacturers. It made sense for the most powerful corporations from the world’ s three strongest economies to collaborate on a project that would enable them to lock up the intangible assets of business in the new millennium and allow them to use those assets to set up production facilities wherever it suited them best. The international character of their production along with their need to capture new markets became the basis of the mutual interest needed for an alliance between them. (p.119) ….

Although they never quite grasped the fact, European trade negotiators had more in common on intellectual property standards with their developing country counterparts than they realized. The US initiative on intellectual property was aimed at European and Japanese markets as much as it was at the tiger economies of Asia. (p.83)

So what would a disenchanted, liberated EC do?  As an American citizen, it is perhaps presumptuous to make suggestions.  But as a French citizen, hey, it’s my EC too!

It could start by distinguishing more clearly between the broader welfare interests of EU citizens and the commercial interests of junior production partners in global Hollywood.  In an earlier era,  it was plausible to think of these commercial and public interests as substantially the same.  Movies were cheap and played a much larger role in public culture.  French or German or Swedish cinemas made stronger claims to being globally-relevant, distinctive national cultural champions.  Copyright infringement was harder, less frequent, and generally industrially organized, which made enforcement a relatively painless proposition.

Today is different.  As IP enforcement targets individual behavior and comes into conflict with other basic values (privacy, freedom of expression), commercial and public interests have begun to diverge.

The EC could also think differently about Europe’s opportunities in the larger digital media transition.  Where some parts of the EU audiovisual industries lose from piracy, the larger impact is chronically exaggerated in EC statements and mitigated (if not completely overshadowed) by the EU system of public subsidies for production.  This may be an inefficient system that produces a lot of movies that relatively few people want to see, but it’s arguably a pretty good model for managing the transition to a more fully realized digital media economy, in which piracy drives the development of cheap, legal, digital access (see Netflix, Hulu, Spotify), and public subsidies ensure that there’s a lot of relatively rich European content to distribute. That, it seems to me, is a plausible vision of a digital media economy that leverages Europe’s strengths, rather than reinforces its weaknesses through a costly war on internet users.

Creating a more unified European audio-visual market is an important goal in this context, but also an achievement that is likely be built on the homogenization of EU production.  The public subsidy model is probably the only counterweight–at a continued cost to wider commercial prospects.  Struggling to adopt the fragile economics of Hollywood blockbusters, in contrast, is a risky bet that should probably be left entirely to the commercial sector.  Leading the way in strengthening digital enforcement seems like an especially bad choice in this context since its short term effect is just to send money the US.  Europe has little to lose from a wait-and-see approach.

De-moralizing the IP debate is also an important step.  At the Americans’ insistence, it’s a trade policy debate now, and nothing should be freely conceded by the lesser partner in those trades.  What, in other words, do the French get in return for enforcing Hollywood’s copyrights?  The answer should not be limited to: the dignity of the French auteur.  Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

Source: Europe’s Odd Anti-Piracy Stance: Send Money to the US!

However, a new report just published (pdf) by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research shows that for larger ISPs there’s an upside to BitTorrent as well. In fact, these companies make a substantial amount of money from BitTorrent traffic.

The goal of the research was to understand the network impact of BitTorrent, both in terms of traffic and the costs involved. To answer this question the researchers conducted a 2-year study where they tracked the downloads of 500,000 people for 169 different countries. The end result is an interesting trend report which, among other things, shows how BitTorrent traffic has developed over time.

For instance, the research found that the average download volume per user per hour increased by 25 percent between November 2009 (110 MB/hour) and November 2010 (139 MB/hour). The number of unique users on the other hand dropped by 10 percent, possibly because people finish their downloads faster. In total the absolute volume of BitTorrent traffic increased by more than 12 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Aside from these general BitTorrent trends, the researchers also looked at the directions BitTorrent traffic are taking. Surprisingly, they find that BitTorrent traffic stays very local. A third of all traffic (32%) does not leave the country of origin and an additional 41 percent only travels to one other country. The researchers further find that the majority stays in local lower tier networks.

The above has some very interesting implications for the costs of BitTorrent traffic for various ISPs.

The researchers translated their findings into the actual costs and revenues of Internet providers and found that contrary to what the public would expect, large Tier 2 ISPs actually make money off BitTorrent traffic. This means that companies such as Comcast, Virgin Media and France Telecom profit directly from heavy downloaders.

“Using inferred business relationships between ISPs, we showed that most BitTorrent traffic flows over cost-free paths and that it generates substantial revenue potential for many higher tier ISPs,” the researchers write.

But not all Internet providers make money off BitTorrent; those in the lower tiers where most traffic is flowing through have less local (and free) traffic and often have to pick up the bill.

“Unlike with tier 2, provider traffic is larger than customer traffic for tier 3, indicating that these ISPs on average are paying for rather than profiting from transit charges due to BitTorrent traffic,” state the researchers.

The report shows that BitTorrent traffic has very a different impact depending on the place an ISP has in the network. Higher tier companies mostly profit from BitTorrent downloads, while lower tier companies are charged for the downloading habits of their consumers. According to the researchers the Internet providers should be aware of the impact BitTorrent has on them, as it may greatly impact their business decisions.

The fact that ‘local’ BitTorrent traffic is preferable is not a new idea. Attempts to keep P2P transfers within the local network as much as possible are not new, and some ISPs have secretly tested the concept in the wild by seeding their own BitTorrent downloads.

As a closing remark we have to note that the study only looked at bandwidth, and not the various other costs BitTorrent traffic has on a network by making millions of connections every day. The takeaway message, however, is that in terms of revenue there are quite a few very large companies that profit directly from heavy BitTorrent users. That’s a conclusion we haven’t heard before.

Source: Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds

It’s not all bad though, a recent paper published by Copenhagen Business School researcher Anders Drachen and his colleagues is a good example. The researchers looked into the magnitude of game piracy on BitTorrent and they monitored the downloads (peers connected to the swarms) of 173 new game titles that were released late 2010, early 2011.

During this period the researchers found that 127 of the 173 games were available on BitTorrent, and across the three months monitoring period these games were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers in total.

As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles. However, the researchers note that there are a few exceptions, such as Bejeweled 3 which was downloaded by more than 250,000 people.

Combined, the 10 most downloaded games are good for over 5.3 million downloads, which equals 42% of the downloads recorded for all 127 games.

Besides game budgets, which appears to be linked to the number of downloads on BitTorrent, the researchers found that game reviews are directly correlated with the interest of pirates. That is, higher reviews generally speaking result in more downloads.

Although it sounds intuitive that review scores are correlated to interest in games (and other entertainment), this is certainly not always the case. To find out whether the number of game downloads on BitTorrent could be predicted by the average review score on Metacritic, the researchers correlated the two.

“The result indicates a statistically significant positive relationship between the number of unique peers and aggregated review scores. Put differently, Metacritic Scores explain 10% of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent,” the researchers write.

The researchers further note that this correlation may be even higher for older games which don’t have as many download spikes. The current research only looked at new releases.

TorrentFreak spoke to Anders Drachen who told us that one of the main motivations for this research was curiosity about the ‘true’ scope of game piracy on BitTorrent.

“There are a lot of numbers being pushed in the piracy debate but a lot of them are being critiqued from different sources, and not a lot of them are based on open methodologies – we were wondering what was actually happening,” he said.

The researchers will continue to look into other factors that influence game piracy and will publish this data in future articles.

Overall the current paper gives a seemingly robust overview of the state of game piracy on BitTorrent. Although the results may not be all that surprising, it’s certainly refreshing to see a decent report on BitTorrent statistics every now and then.

Source: Game Piracy Linked To Critic’s Review Scores

Tribler’s BitTorrent client has been in development for more than 5 years and continues to deliver experimental improvements and innovative ideas. Last year Tribler became the first truly decentralized BitTorrent client that doesn’t rely on central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines. But the researchers have more in store.

The latest innovation from the Tribler team is promising something all BitTorrent users are interested in – faster downloads. The researchers came up with what they call a Superior Seeding Standard, a set of rules that reward users who put the most effort into sharing. The new standard is an alternative to the current tit-for-tat algorithm and is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies often seen at private BitTorrent trackers.

The researchers have carefully analyzed the effectiveness of private BitTorrent trackers and found that users achieve great speeds, but that the ratio requirements also discriminate against users who don’t have high-bandwidth connections.

The Tribler team proposes a new standard which rewards BitTorrent users independent of their connection limitations. Instead of looking at the share ratio alone, it uses the ‘seeding effort’ to reward BitTorrent users by giving them priority in the swarm and thus faster downloads. Again, all of the above works without a central server.

The Tribler team ran several experiments with their new Superior Seeding Standard and found that the download speeds for people who share fairly are greatly improved compared to current transfer speeds on public trackers. The initial results suggest that it is more fair to people who are good BitTorrent citizens than the classic tit-for-tat algorithm.

“One of the problems with tit-for-tat is that it provides no motivation for seeding the terabytes of long-tail content that’s out there on BitTorrent,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. “We believe that people should be rewarded with priority downloads when they are seeding these more obscure files, especially the stuff which only gets a few downloads a month.”

“The ‘seeding rewards’ concept has been in the making for several years. It always required a central server, but we finally made it work in a truly decentralized manner with robustness against cheating. We implemented a first version of this proposed ‘Superior Seeding Standard’ in the latest Tribler release, and we expect that it will be tweaked and optimized quite a bit in the years to come,” Dr. Pouwelse added. “

The full technical specifications and several performance tests are detailed by these scientists in the paper titled “Fast Download but Eternal Seeding: The Reward and Punishment of Sharing Ratio Enforcement,” which will be presented at the P2P 2011 conference later this year.

As is true for many of Tribler’s innovations, getting it adopted by other BitTorrent clients will prove to be a tricky endeavor. Those who install Tribler will nonetheless notice that the concept of an entirely decentralized and fast BitTorrent network is already reality. The next and final step is to make it anonymous, that would certainly justify the millions of euros in tax money that has gone into the Tribler project in the last few years.

Source: Researchers Improve BitTorrent Download Speeds

This week Cisco published their latest version of the Visual Networking Index, which offers some interesting insights into the development of Internet traffic in the coming years. One of the main conclusions is that relative to overall Internet traffic, file-sharing is on a downslope.

Cisco’s data shows that in 2010 file-sharing traffic was responsible for a massive 40% of all consumer Internet traffic. However, by 2015 this percentage will drop to ‘just’ 24%, because other sources of traffic – such as video streaming services Netflix and YouTube – will grow at an even greater rate.

But that doesn’t mean that less data will be shared, on the contrary; Cisco predicts that global file-sharing traffic will continue to grow at an average rate of 23% per year. This means that by 2015, file-sharing traffic will increase to 13,797 petabytes per month, up from a measly 4,968 petabytes in 2010. Compared to today, file-sharing traffic will more than double by 2015 if Cisco’s predictions hold.

Although there’s no region where file-sharing traffic is not expected to increase, the growth will be most pronounced in Latin America and both Central and Eastern Europe, with an annual growth rate of 35%. North America sits in the middle with a growth rate of 18%. Western Europe stays behind with a meager 14% uplift a year, but this still means that file-sharing traffic will double there in 2015 compared to 2010.

Another interesting trend that’s worth noting is that non-P2P file-sharing traffic is on the rise. With non-P2P Cisco refers to direct download services such as RapidShare and Megaupload. These will generate an estimated 5,680 petabytes a month by 2015, an increase of more than 600% compared to 2010.

Although Cisco’s predictions are noteworthy, one has to wonder how accurate they are. Just last year Cisco estimated that file-sharing traffic would be good for 7 exabytes by 2014, but a year later this has already been adjusted to more than 11 exabytes. Quite a difference for a seemingly uneventful year with no major breakthroughs in the file-sharing landscape.

But then again, even the best fortune-tellers have an occasional off-day. The overall conclusion, that file-sharing is here to stay, is something we have to agree with.

Source: File-Sharing Traffic Predicted to Double By 2015

With their research, the researchers pointed out that gathering evidence on BitTorrent downloaders is full of pitfalls.

Perhaps not coincidentally the same research group is also behind the “privacy preserving” BitTorrent client OneSwarm, currently developed by Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek, two PhD students at the University of Washington.

Unlike other regular BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm allows users to share files only with a selected group of friends. While regular and public BitTorrent downloads are also supported, the privacy settings allow users to obscure the source of a transfer by sending it through multiple intermediaries.

“Virtually everyone on the Internet is a content producer, but today we only have one model for sharing: sign over the rights to your work to a website, with the hope that it will respect your privacy,” researcher Michael Piatek told TorrentFreak commenting on the importance of privacy on BitTorrent.

“OneSwarm is an attempt to provide an alternative. Our view is that private data sharing is an essential service in free and open societies,” he added. How the various privacy settings work is explained in detail in the video below, posted by the OneSwarm team.

Although OneSwarm has been in development for a while, the researchers have made its source available on GitHub in an update this week. Binaries and the source code are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.

We tested OneSwarm, and although the browser interface is something you have to get used to, the download speeds are more than reasonable. This is also confirmed in one of the academic papers published by the OneSwarm team (pdf). In a performance comparison they found that it outperformed other “private” sharing options such as Freenet and BitTorrent over Tor.

Users have to be aware though, that while using the ‘public’ mode transfers are not anonymized.

That said, an Open Source effort to allow more privacy controls for BitTorrent users is something that can only be encouraged. The next step many BitTorrent users are looking forward to is the arrival of a fully anonymized BitTorrent client with decent speeds.

Source: OneSwarm: The Privacy Aware BitTorrent Client

The world’s largest BitTorrent site has teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University and is encouraging its users to take a sociological survey on file-sharing related matters.

The 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 to draft more sensible laws. Needless to say, this is a topic that The Pirate Bay takes to heart.

“The Pirate Bay undertakes this study in cooperation with the research group Cybernorms at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University in Sweden. Completing this short survey will take only a few minutes of your time, after which you will be redirected to The Pirate Bay,” the introduction of the survey reads.

“Understanding online norms and values is essential to developing relevant and effective laws and policies. The purpose of this survey is to help researchers to better understand habits and norms within the file-sharing community. With your help, we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the internet,” it adds.

The survey itself is pretty straightforward and can literally be answered in under a minute. Due to the nature of the topic, all data will be kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information such as IP-addresses will be stored.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Cybernorms head of research Måns Svensson to find out more about the project and the purpose of the project.

“In this survey that we are conducting together with The Pirate Bay we are collecting data that will give us information about file sharing around the world,” he told us.

“We know that recent developments in terms of law and law enforcement in Sweden have weak support in the social norms of society. By conducting a global study among file sharers we will be able to get new information on the situation in other parts of the world.”

“In a broader sense we want to follow and study the social norms that are emerging as a result of new technology and law’s ability to respond to the changes. Our hope is that better knowledge in this area will lead to a more sensible legal development,” Svensson added.

Marcin De Kaminski, PhD candidate in Sociology of Law at Lund University and researcher at the Cybernorms group told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay has been a partner from the start but that this is the first time the site’s users are being asked to participate.

“The Pirate Bay is still one of the top hundred largest sites on the Internet. As a researcher, it is a great opportunity to be able to base your work upon this. Especially when you’re trying to target a community which sometimes is hard to grasp,” De Kaminski said.

The Cybernorms group officially started in 2009 and previously made the news when it found that millions of Swedes started to hide their online identity in response to tougher anti-piracy legislation. At the time the researchers found that 10 percent of all Swedes between the age 15 and 25 were taking measures to protect themselves against the increasing online surveillance.

The new survey in collaboration with The Pirate Bay is truly the first of its kind. Although many academics and commercial research outfits have looked into the file-sharing issue, to date, none of them has reached out to such a massive group of BitTorrent users. We encourage all our readers who’ve occasionally shared a file to take part, and we’ll report on the results as soon as they come in.

Source: The Pirate Bay Joins Academic “Cybernorms” Research Group

Through an elaborate survey the Government wanted to find out more about the views of artists on piracy, DRM, and other opportunities and challenges they face in the digital era. The questions covered in this article were answered by nearly 4,000 artists of all ages, including musicians, filmmakers, authors and photographers. The results give a unique insight into the position of artists on this controversial subject.

One of the results that stands out directly is that artists are pirates too. Not all of them of course, but a healthy percentage. Of all the respondents surveyed on the subject, 22% indicated that they had downloaded copyrighted works without the owners’ permission in the last 12 months. Another 71% told the researchers they hadn’t downloaded anything without permission during this period, and the remaining 7% didn’t know, or didn’t want to answer the question.

A follow up question among those who admitted to downloading others’ copyrighted works, found that music is by far the most downloaded media type. Over 80% of the downloaders downloaded music, and little over 40% also downloaded movies. Other categories such as E-books and games were less popular, with around 5% downloaders interested in these works.

Aside from their own ‘piracy’ habits, the survey also asked the respondents about their role as ‘victims’ of unauthorized file-sharing.

One of the questions dealt with whether the artists think they are being financially harmed by file-sharing. Interestingly, only about 12% of artists completely agree with the statement that file-sharing hurts them (~16% agree). The majority of the artists are not convinced that file-sharing is doing them any financial harm, and some actually think the opposite is true. What’s worth nothing is that higher educated artists in particular believe that file-sharing is doing them no financial harm.

Instead of hurting their wallets, the majority of the artists believe that file-sharing helps to promote their work. Little over 50% of those questioned responded affirmatively to the question of whether file-sharing helps to get their work known among the public, while only 5% completely disagreed with this statement. In particular the younger artists (< 25yo) recognized promotional benefits, as more than 80% thought file-sharing increases the popularity of their work.

Moving on to DRM, the survey found that 30% of the artists believe that DRM is hurting legitimate customers through access restrictions. Despite this negative view, 70% of all artists still believe their work should be protected by DRM. With regard to DRM there appears to be quite a large generation gap. More than 40% of the artists younger than 25 years old say DRM is hurting their relationship with the public, while none of the artists over 75 years old believes it does any harm.

Finally, the artists were also surveyed on whether individual file-sharers should be treated more harshly. Interestingly, close to 60% indicate that they should, with an even higher percentage among the older artists. Even among the people who admitted that they were downloading without permission, nearly one third said that harsher measures are needed to deter file-sharers.

All in all it can be concluded from the survey that the majority of Dutch artists don’t believe that unauthorized file-sharing is hurting them financially, and that it may actually help them to gain a larger audience. Despite these liberal views, a majority of the artists support harsher measures against unauthorized file-sharing and for DRM to ‘protect’ their works.

A mixed message, but one that’s hopeful, especially since the younger generations recognize the benefits of sharing, even when it’s without permission.

Source: Artists Don’t Think Piracy Hurts Them Financially, Study Shows

The aim of BitMate is to drastically improve the download speeds of peers on low-bandwidth connection (5 to 20 KB/sec), to make BitTorrent more effective in places where people might need it the most. If we believe the claims of the researchers, they have succeeded in making a difference.

TorrentFreak contacted Dr.Umar Saif, Associate Professor and leader of the initiative, to learn more about the new BitTorrent client.

“We have spent close to 2 years experimenting with various tweaks in BitTorrent, using both real-world and synthetic swarms. BitMate is our first public release and is an ongoing project,” Saif said.

During the latest tests the researchers found that compared to traditional clients, the download speeds on low bandwith connections can receive up to a 70% boost with BitMate, while upload contributions may improve by up to 1000%.

“In our target conditions, Bitmate can almost double the download performance. At the same time, it performs at least as well as the traditional BitTorrent clients for high-bandwidth peers,” Saif noted.

The beauty of it all, is that other peers are not negatively affected by these improvements.

“BitMate enhances the performance of low-bandwidth nodes without cheating, circumventing the fairness policy of BitTorrent or adversely affecting the performance of other peers,” Saif told TorrentFreak.

Among other things, BitMate can establish this advantage by prioritizing connections to other slow peers, by minimizing cross-ISP traffic and by avoiding redundant downloads. Combined with several other optimizations, the Vuze-based BitMate client is able to speed up downloads on slow connections.

“Instead of wasting optimistic unchokes on high bandwidth peers, a BitMate client optimistically unchokes those peers that have a similar low-bandwidth. As a result, a BitMate client invests its scarce upload bandwidth on peers that are most likely to reciprocate.”

“At the same time, BiTMate leaves the tit-for-tat reciprocal unchoke policy untouched to uphold the fairness of BitTorrent. This leads to both increased performance and fairness since low-bandwidth clients can quickly form mutually beneficial peer-to-peer connections,” Saif said.

A win-win situation for all BitTorrent users, generously funded by the U.S. State Department. It’s almost too good to be true.

BitMate’s latest version was released to the public three days ago and can be downloaded for free. The source code of BitMate is available at GitHub. Although the project is aimed at developing countries, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world that are on a slow connection, and might benefit from BitMate.

Source: BitMate: A BitTorrent Client for Poor Bandwidth People

Although we’ve been quite critical of such studies in the past, especially when they’re funded by the entertainment industry, we have to admit that this is one of the best reports we’ve seen to date. Those who are interested in the use of BitTorrent and how it compares to other file-sharing services should definitely have a read.

The researchers clearly know what BitTorrent is all about, and although several assumptions and methodological choices paint the outcome to a certain degree, there’s not much to complain about in the data they present. Unfortunately, however, even solid data can be easily misinterpreted in the press.

Over the last days several readers have pointed us to an article that appeared in two of the top tech news outlets, Wired and Ars Technica. The article – “Where have all the music pirates gone?” – is written by one of the best tech reporters we know, but in this case the conclusion is way off.

The article zooms in on Envisional’s breakdown of content types that are “most popular” among BitTorrent downloaders. For this analysis the Envisional researchers looked at the 10,000 most downloaded files on the PublicBitTorrent tracker in December 2010.

As it turns out, pornography and films are in the lead with 35.8 and 35.2 percent respectively. Music on the other hand can be found at the bottom of the list with a measly 2.9 percent. Sounds plausible so far, but the article failed to mention something that clearly affects the outcome.

The overview of the 10,000 “most popular” torrents is based on a snapshot of the number of leechers. In other words, the rank of the most popular torrents is based on the number of people people who were downloading a file at the time the tracker was polled, not those who already finished it (including seeders).

This obviously results in a huge bias since the average video file of BitTorrent is much larger than the average music file. Based on a sample of millions of torrents we found that the average video torrent is 1.73 GB while music torrents average at 214 MB. So, video files are 8 times the size of music files.

Larger file sizes mean longer download times, and this is one of the explanations why there are far less music files in the top 10,000. Movie torrent simply take longer to complete so there are generally more people listed as leechers. If the top 10,000 was based on actual completed downloads the percentage of music torrents would have been much higher.

We’re of course not arguing that more people download music on BitTorrent than movies, but based on the above it seems likely that the difference between the two categories in “actual” popularity (completed downloads in a given time) is being misrepresented. One thing’s certain, the music pirates have definitely not vanished from BitTorrent yet.

The original article does point out correctly that worldwide, the music industry is doing a much better job at presenting alternatives to piracy than the movie industry. Whether music piracy has gone down because of it is a different question though, and one that at least needs some comparison data in order to be answered correctly.

Source: Arrr! The Music Pirates Are Still Here

Less known is the fact that the people who are adding content – the initial seeders – can also be exposed quite easily. With this info copyright holders could potentially track down the big uploaders that are responsible for providing the content which goes on to be distributed among millions of people, and take action against them.

TorrentFreak spoke with Arnaud Legout, one of the researchers who examined how easy it is to spy on BitTorrent users. “Our goal is to make the privacy issues associated with BitTorrent usage public,” he said. “BitTorrent is truly one of the most beautiful, elegant, and efficient protocols ever designed. However, it has never been designed with privacy in mind.”

Legout and his colleagues found that spying on BitTorrent users is relatively easy and cheap. “We showed that anybody can monitor tens of millions of BitTorrent users in real time from a single machine and with a xDSL connection,” he told us.

The researchers also found that pinpointing the IP-addesses that make files available (initial seeds) is relatively easy to do. “We were able to identify 70% of the initial seeds for all the contents uploaded to The Pirate Bay in one month,” Legout told us, adding that they could have achieved a much higher percentage if they further refined their techniques.

The researchers were able to find the initial uploaders by quickly jumping on new torrents that were added on The Pirate Bay. This allowed them to grab the IP-addresses of the ‘content providers’.

Another interesting detail that the research revealed is that the majority of all the uploaded content originates from a small group of users. The Pirate Bay has millions of users, but only 100 IP-addresses are responsible for seeding 30% of the material uploaded to The Pirate Bay. The top 1000 IP-addresses are the ‘content providers’ of 60% of the torrents.

Taken together, this means that anti-piracy outfits could quite easily track down the biggest providers of copyrighted material, instead of just going after regular sharers.

Although most of these top providers do not use their home connection but high bandwidth seedboxes instead, shutting these down through legal action might hinder the distribution of copyrighted material.

Source: Research Exposes Risks for BitTorrent Seeders

We’ve gone through the data, and it seems that BitSmash is off on the numbers of seeds and peers. One of the top downloads according to the service is The Incredible Hulk, with 414 peers and 139 seeders. However, Mininova and several other BitTorrent sites report that the torrent has more than 15,000 peers, and a manual scrape of one of the trackers returned close to 18,000 peers.

The service is of course still being developed, so these numbers might be corrected later. Smash, the founder of the project told us: “I’m going to stand by our numbers,” but said he will take a look at the inconsistencies. He encourages everyone to submit feedback while the site is in Beta.

Interestingly, BitSmash has decided to include a link to the .torrent files on their detail pages, which basically makes it a meta-search engine as well. The anti-piracy lobby might not be too happy about that. A few days ago we reported on the Swedish news site Nyheter24, that was criticized for linking to torrents on The Pirate Bay.

The service will officially launch October 15th, and later this year there will also be an API available for other services and websites to access, who can use the data for other purposes. Overall we think that BitSmash could develop into a great research tool. It’s worth checking out.

Source: BitSmash Launches BitTorrent Statistics Tool

The researchers conclude that that people who download more music actually buy more CDs. They report: “We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

This basically means that if someone downloads 270 songs a year via BitTorrent, he or she will buy 9 CDs more than someone who only downloads 27 songs. So, in a way illegal downloads actually convert into more CD sales.

Overall the researchers found no difference between pirates and other people in the number of CDs they buy. They did not find a positive or a negative relationship between filesharing and CD sales. So, at worst, filesharing isn’t the cause for a drop in CD sales. It might even be a boon to it.

This study once again confirms that piracy is not as bad as the recording industry content “owners” want us to believe. Filesharing gives people the opportunity to discover new music for free. It makes it easier to try new music before you buy. Right now, downloading songs off P2P networks is pretty much the only way to listen to complete tracks before deciding to buy them.

It is worth mentioning that there are legal alternatives, like Soundpedia and Lala.com’s upcoming service, which will let you stream entire songs for free. However, most people will still prefer pirated music because the quality is much better and they can transfer it to their MP3 player.

Source: Canadian Study: Piracy Boosts CD Sales

The Harvard project is all about a fresh new approach. To be honest, have we seen a new trick since eMule and Bittorrent started? Things have clearly slowed down in the last years.

The Harvard researchers are currently working on one of hardest P2P problems, ensuring uploads. P2P dies or thrives depending on how much upload people donate. By introducing electronic “currency” for uploads they think they can make P2P HDTV Video on Demand possible. With the minor detail that we all have to switch to their client…

The latest version of Tribler enhances the standard tit-for-tat BitTorrent algorithms with something they call the give-to-get algorithm (PDF article). This new algorithm allows their users to benefit from a good ratio without using a central server like private BitTorrent trackers do.

Tribler users can still join every BitTorrent swarm and play the tit-for-tat game with old-school BitTorrent users. But, when they meet another Tribler peer they switch to give-to-get mode where the currency meter is running. This turns the Tribler network into a private Tracker network without the central server. This basically means, the more you share, the faster your downloads will go.

Every Tribler client keeps an eye on MByte counts of fellow peers. They gossip around about who is a leecher and who is a top dog, without the details of which Hollywood movie it was. The only information displayed about this in the GUI is a list in your profile of the “Top 10 Tribler Uploaders”. For the next version of Tribler they plan to turn that list of top dog uploaders into a decentralized trust system and enable users to correct typos and add tags to the content. In short, BitTorrent would go “2.0″.

But let’s first see if they can really handle network pollution and spam without a central server. It will be quite tricky to get such “Google PageRank” trust algorithms working in P2P.

Source: Harvard Develops P2P Client that uses Bandwidth as “Currency”

2,600 Americans took part in the study via telephone and on the web. The study found that users basically don’t believe or care that movie studios are losing money when someone illegally downloads a movie. Interestingly, 78 percent of the people found stealing a DVD from a store to be a “serious offence”, but only 40 percent considered downloading a movie to be just as bad.

Director of the study, Kaan Yigit said in a statement that the movie industry was suffering from the “Robin Hood effect” due to the large profits it makes. “There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already and as a result don’t think of movie downloading as a big deal,” he said.

Just as we noted in a recent piece, the study found that unless a legal offering is competitive enough, users are not going to stop downloading pirated movies. “The current crop of ‘download to own’ movie services and the new ones coming into the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise file-sharing will continue to thrive,” said Yigit.

Here’s a direct link to the press release. (PDF)

Source: More Than 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies

The article compares bt.etree.org, piratebay.org, torrentportal.com, easytree.org, btefnet.net and alluvion.org. The data appears to be a little outdated, because both easytree.org and the famous bt.etree.org were shutdown in spring 2005.

One of the main conclusions of the researchers is that a relatively small percentage of peers is responsible for most of the uploading. The top 10% sharers upload just as much as the rest of the people in the swarm.

Another interesting finding is that the highest percentage of seeders can be found at The Piratebay (29%), and the most sharers at easytree (59%). This can be explained by the fact that easytree is a private tracker, enforcing “healthy” share ratios.

Unfortunately, the authors make a big mistake when they suggest that RSS feeds might be responsible for the higher seed percentages at btefnet.net. At the time the data was collected (early 2005) only Azureus had experimental RSS support, and only a few people were actually using it.

Personally I think it it hard to make comparisons between there six torrent sites. It is nothing more than comparing apples and oranges, they offer different content, and target a different audience.

Gifting Technologies: A BitTorrent Case Study

Source: Comparing Sharing Behavior in BitTorrent Communities

Arnoud Legout further states that the last pieces problem is overstated whereas the first pieces problem is underestimated.

Link

Source: BitTorrent field study