Featured, News - Friday, July 23, 2010 13:14 - 13 Comments

Ballarat Uni claims 89% of BitTorrent is illegal

The University of Ballarat has published a research paper claiming 89 percent of BitTorrent files it studied during a certain period were confirmed to infringe copyright, a result immediately hailed by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft as a victory in its war against file sharing.

In the report — available in full online from AFACT’s web site (PDF) — researchers from the university’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory analysed the most popular BitTorrent trackers on the Torrentz website on April 21st, 2010 and scraped the information from them.

Torrentz is a search engine which combines results from many different BitTorrent search engines, so the BitTorrent servers traced by the University of Ballarat consisted of sites as diverse as Demonoid, MightyNova, TorrentBay, BitReactor and so on.

It appears that more than a million individual torrent files were tracked from the servers. But in the end, the university found that just 4 percent of torrents — more than 15,000 — were responsible for 90 percent of seeders. In the BitTorrent system, a seeder is a BitTorrent use who has downloaded all of one file and is now hosting it rather than simultaneously downloading chunks.

“In summary, our results indicate that 89 percent of all torrents from our sample are confirmed to be infringing copyright, both by the number of files and total number of current seeders,” wrote the university in its paper. “Of the torrents in the top three categories (movies, music and TV shows), there were no legal torrents in the sample.”

Continue…