First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.

Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution – directly and indirectly – dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.

The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.

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The current era of intellectual property is waning. It has been based on two faulty assumptions made nearly three decades ago: that since some intellectual property (IP) is good, more must be better; and that IP is about controlling knowledge rather than sharing it. These assumptions are as inaccurate in biotechnology , the field of science covered by this report , as they are in other fields from music to software.

The discussion throughout focuses on how this “Old IP” system harms innovation and consumers. It mentions how the music industry is lobbying for higher penalties for copyright infringement, while they refuse to try out new business models. Similarly, how the movie industry tries to ban and restrict new technology, until they realize they can make money off it.

Perhaps even more concerning, when it comes to biotechnology , medication, treatments, equipment , withholding information or purposefully restricting it will lead to deaths. One example the paper makes on this topic is the lawsuits 39 pharmaceutical companies brought against the South Africa government, for trying to act effectively to deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis there. Such restrictions have undoubtedly hastened the deaths of thousands if not millions.

This study is not alone in stating the problems with patents in research and development. In August, Kenyan medicine-men revealed that they have kept their traditional practices to themselves, because of the fear of patents. With the high costs, and excessive paperwork, filing patents on the techniques is not feasible to them, according to a report in Business Daily Africa. They are worried that companies that find the patent process trivial will patent their techniques, and prevent them from being used.

With them on this is the Pirate Party International, a collection comprised of all the national Pirate Partys) has mentioned that biopatents are a source of concern and an area they hope to change. Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak: “This shows yet again how Big Pharmacy practices are robbing people of their medicine; only now, they have managed to silence the critical word-of-mouth distribution of indigenous knowledge, through fear of monopolization of traditional medicine. It is high time for the patent system in general, and pharmacy patents in particular, to be exposed and abolished.”

Yet these arguments and studies appear to be falling on deaf ears. Today, a bill aimed at increasing the enforcement of these IP ‘rights’ still further , including the ability for the government to file civil IP complaints without the complaint of the IP holder , got it’s first reading in the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee. With only a few months left of this session of Congress, the lobby groups are almost certainly going all out to get them passed, despite strong opposition. Lost (or ignored) in this push is the intent of copyright and patents, which the US Constitution says is to promote progress, which as the study shows, it no longer does.

It also goes without saying that despite this talk of ‘old IP’ and ‘new IP’, there are those that refuse to use the term at all.

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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)

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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

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