The results claimed to support the effectiveness of a 3-strikes system for copyright infringers, but those who took a closer look saw that this was not the case.

As we pointed out, the results could also show that none of the current file-sharers would be deterred, as the question was also answered by the 78 percent of people who don’t even use file-sharing software.

The press release was nothing more that a cheap and misleading marketing stunt and it’s tricks like this that are causing the anti-piracy lobby to lose credibility at a rapid pace.

Just a few hours ago AFACT came out with another press release. This time they plug the results of a study they appear to be unrelated to, conducted by the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). These are the same researchers who released some rather incompetent reports in the past, but their latest study shows signs of improvement.

As AFACT is happy to point out, the researchers conclude that 97.2 percent of the most popular files on BitTorrent are infringing (and that a lot are faked). Although this conclusion is probably not too far off, not all journalists are eager to pick it up as some are starting to see that AFACT has a habit of twisting the truth.

In a piece titled “Fooling some of the media, some of the time,” Canberra Times journalist Myles Peterson explains his concerns.

When Peterson received the three-strikes study press release last week he couldn’t help but notice that News Corp newspapers received the details before ‘regular’ journalists did. Yes indeed, that is the same News Corp organization that is a partner of anti-piracy groups such as IPAF, DEAA and AFACT.

“Last Monday, The Australian ran a full-court press in print and online dubbed ‘Piracy, the disease that’s crippling our creative industries’, comprising a number of articles from various angles, all attacking the scourge of online file sharing. Articles also appeared in News Corp tabloids The Adelaide Advertiser and The Daily Telegraph,” Peterson writes.

“That’s odd, I thought. The avalanche of coverage seemed to disproportionately reference the new study. Would a media outlet co-operate with a lobby group to generate mass coverage of a topic, I wondered.”

While following up on the study, Petersen noticed that various Australian anti-piracy outfits are conveniently sharing personnel. This, added with the recent Wikileaks revelation that the MPAA is the driving force behind these groups, lead to further doubts. They were only heightened when the obvious flaws in the ‘independent’ study were pointed out by us.

Using journalists in a propaganda war orchestrated by foreign companies wasn’t a very pleasant thought to Petersen.

“The story behind the stories, both those that appeared in News Corp media and TorrentFreak’s balancing rebuttal, stayed with me, as did a series of worrying questions. Are AFACT, the DEAA and IPAF being co-ordinated by the same group of people? Are these people being directed by the Motion Picture Association of America, as the WikiLeaks cable suggested? ” he writes.

“What stuck with me most was a similar concern to one uttered recently by Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown. Did a group of journalists put together a press campaign based on a biased study supplied by a lobby group that represents their own employer?”

And if that’s not bad enough, in a few days the anti-piracy outfits have a meeting at the Federal General Attorney’s office to push their agenda at the highest level. The fear is that this talk will be far from balanced, and we can only hope that the hosts will be able to see through it.

“When our federal lawyers host these lobby groups at the end of the week, I hope they cast a more critical eye over any research presented than certain media outlets did. I also hope they are able to work out which person in the room represents the ACIG, AFACT, DEAA, IPAF, MPA, MPAA or all of the above,” Petersen concludes.

The good news is that the piece in the Canberra Times shows that not all journalists are indirectly working for the MPAA. Increasingly, we see skepticism towards the continuous stream of anti-piracy propaganda and more room for a sensible discussion about the topics at stake. Perhaps the tide is turning?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Well, they’re back.

This time they don’t have much data to share. Instead, they came up with a revolutionary tool that will soon end all piracy on the Internet.

“The international movie industry has a new weapon against internet pirates – a program written by two Ballarat computer scientists,” The Herald Sun wrote two days ago.

“PhD student Robert Layton and researcher Prof Paul Watters, of Ballarat University’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL), wrote a program that can track illegal downloads through torrent websites,” the article adds.

How revolutionary. Those who read on will notice that they actually wrote a tracker scraper. Something anyone with a little bit of coding experience can do. Or even better, hire a cheap freelancer who’ll build one for you in less than a day.

Nothing new here.

Even worse, the only part where some actual knowledge about BitTorrent is required – interpreting the results – is the weak spot of these genius researchers. They failed this test not once, but twice already.

What they’re good at though, with a little help from the press, is creating FUD. Perhaps that justifies the funding from the entertainment industry.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last summer we debunked a study by the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). Carefully we spelled out the many obvious mistakes that were made, both in data collection and the research design in general. In addition, we contacted the lead researcher, offering our help.

Several news outlets who published the story were kind enough to acknowledge our critique, but the researchers themselves went silent and didn’t respond directly to the errors we pointed out. Today, the same researchers are again making headlines, and it seems that they haven’t learned a thing.

In a replication of the study they conducted earlier this year, the researchers have studied what’s being downloaded on BitTorrent. Among other things they want to find out which files are popular on BitTorrent at the moment, and how many of these are infringing.

But there’s a problem. Again.

In common with those behind last year’s study, the researchers have no clue what they are doing. Mistake after mistake has been made, as we will point out below. The worst part is that some media outlets appear to be taking this research seriously, while it’s in fact a disgrace for anyone who works in academia.

In large parts the methodology is the same as last time, so we won’t report all the painful mistakes that were pointed out before. Instead, will will just sum up some of the new findings, and point out why these are clearly wrong.

1. Most downloaded files

The data collected for the new study was gathered in July 2010, and the researchers used the number of active seeders at the time to determine what files are ‘most downloaded’. One would assume that such a list would be dominated by new titles, but according to the Australian researchers this is not the case.

In their top 10 most downloaded (read ‘seeded’) movies, we find the following titles that have been available for years:

At TorrentFreak we have years of experience at tracking BitTorrent downloads, and we’ve never seen any old titles in our weekly lists. Older titles do show up as popular in tracker scrapes sometimes, but they are always from fake torrent files or manipulated trackers. Common sense should have alerted the researchers that something might have been wrong with their data collection methods or sample.

The report also claims that the aXXo release of the film Wanted had a massive 50,582 seeders two years after it was released. Aside from the fact that we haven’t seen such a high seeder count in weeks, it is absolutely impossible that a download would have these impressive figures two years after it first became available.

The inaccuracy of the most downloaded film list is nicely illustrated by the researchers themselves. Aside from gathering data from BitTorrent trackers, they also looked at the 100 most searched for terms on the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt at the time. Interestingly, none of the older movies listed in their top 10 most downloaded list was present in the list of popular searches.

2. Popular Categories

As we suggested, to determine the popularity of various categories the researchers used a random sample of torrents this time, instead of the sample of popular torrents they previously selected. Despite this change the gathered data differs significantly from what most torrent sites report.

Based on a sample of 127,600 torrent files they conclude that nearly 70% of the torrents are video content and less than 2% is software.

If we look at the >10 million torrent files (unique hashes) that are available on a quality torrent site such as BitSnoop, we see a different picture. On BitSnoop 9% of all torrents are categorised as software, while video adds up to ‘just’ 52%. This leads us to believe that the sample the researchers used is heavily biased towards video content, or that their categorization algorithms are flawed.

3. Multiplying Trackers

The last point that we want to address is again an illustration of the incompetence of the researchers. What we missed last time is that they simply added up the reports of the different BitTorrent trackers they scraped. If “torrent A” is tracked by 5 individual trackers, then the researchers add up the seeder counts of them all, while in fact they are often used by the same downloaders.

Or put differently, most torrent clients allow people to use multiple trackers. That means that they can be listed as a seeder at several trackers at the same time. The researchers didn’t calculate this in, and are therefore overestimating the download counts, which were already suspicious to begin with.

Sadly enough we have to conclude that this new study is just as bad as the previous one, and totally unusable to describe the BitTorrent landscape. We’re not exaggerating if we say that the researchers are incompetent, lack common sense, and are too stubborn to take advice when we offered it.

When I contacted researcher Dr. Paul Watters last time he sent the following reply: “I would be happy to send you a complimentary of my O’Reilly ‘Statistics in a Nutshell’ book that might give further insight into statistical methodology.” I chuckled, since I’ve worked as an academic myself for years, publishing in high impact peer-reviewed journals.

Perhaps the State Government of Victoria, IBM, Westpac Banking Corporation, the Australian Federal Police and Village Roadshow should ask for a refund, as they all supported the research financially.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.