TorrentFreak

A new academic paper by a researcher from the North Carolina State University has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and music album sales. Contrary to what’s often claimed by the major record labels, the paper concludes that there is absolutely no evidence that unauthorized downloads negatively impact sales. Instead, the research finds that more piracy directly leads to more album sales.

The Pirate Bay has partnered with the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University to carry out the second round of the largest file-sharing survey in history. Through the survey the researchers examine the norms of file-sharers, and how they respond to increased censorship and tougher laws. One of the main goals of the research project is to give a counterweight to entertainment industry propaganda.

When talking about piracy the entertainment industry and politicians often use the term “theft.” This is a huge problem according to the Swedish sociologist of law Stefan Larsson. In his thesis “Metaphors and Norms – Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society,” he explains that these metaphors are in part keeping the wide gap between people’s norms and the law intact.

In recent years the European Commission has promoted tougher anti-piracy legislation. The question is though, whether this is really in the best interests of European citizens. In a guest article for TorrentFreak, Joe Karaganis of the Social Science Research Council explores this topic.

A new report published by Northwestern University and Telefónica Research discovered some BitTorrent trends worth sharing. During a 2-year period the researchers monitored an unprecedented sample of 500,000 people in 169 countries. Aside from showing that BitTorrent users download more and more data, the report also finds that large ISPs including Comcast are actually making money off BitTorrent traffic.

A new study by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo explores the magnitude of game piracy on public BitTorrent trackers. The researchers tracked 173 new game releases over a three-month period and found that these were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers. They further show that the number of downloads on BitTorrent can be predicted by the scores of game reviewers.

Researchers from the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology are proposing a new set of rules that should significantly improve the download speeds of many BitTorrent users. The new “Superior Seeding Standard” implemented in the latest release of the Tribler BitTorrent client is inspired by the ratio-enforcement policies at private tracker communities, but doesn’t discriminate against people with low bandwidth connections.