The Higher Education Opportunity (HEO) Act of 2008 requires US universities and colleges to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use filesharing networks to share copyrighted files. A recent study found that, per institution, between $350,000 and $500,000 a year is spent tackling the piracy problem.
A recently released study has claims that the current ‘Intellectual Property’ situation in the world is not working well. Driven by a fear of losing out, and bolstered by an attitude that profit is the aim of IP, progress is hampered. Not only by the entertainment industry, also in biotechnology where medicines are sometimes restricted or withheld, causing deaths.
Digital Life America, a unit of the Solutions Research Group, has found that out of the 32 million Americans who have downloaded at least 1 movie from the Internet, 80 percent have done so over P2P.
Just as many social bookmarking sites are said to be run by a small group of active users, the same seems to hold for BitTorrent communities where 10% of the users upload as much as the rest of the 90% put together.
