Study: Only 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Are Legal

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A new study by the University of Ballarat in Australia has confirmed what the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have been telling us all along, that nearly all of the content being shared through the BitTorrent protocol is illegal copyrighted material.

The study looked at 23 torrent trackers (services that provide torrent clients with the information necessary to connect to peers and download chunks of the files). From those trackers, they sampled 1,000 files, chosen “randomly” from the most actively seeded files (seeing a problem with this yet?).

Much to almost nobody’s surprise, most of those top-seeded files were either pornographic, copyrighted material, or unidentifiable (meaning they could not tell if the material was copyrighted or not).

They concluded that at least 89% were confirmed to be copyrighted material, while only 3 files (or 0.3%) were determined to be definitely legal. The top downloaded files were movies, television shows, music, and software/games.

The problem with the study (or at least in the way it was reported) is that 1) the nature of content often depends on the trackers, and they may have just chosen 23 trackers that are known to send illegal content, and 2) choosing the top-seeded material may not actually be representative of the entire lot.  There could be a disproportionately larger number of legal files with fewer seeds.  That would only mean that illegal files are more popular, not necessarily more prevalent.

Those problems aside, few content publishers are surprised with the findings. One interesting point to note, however, is that P2P file-sharing users tend to buy more content than non-users, meaning that file sharing might actually do the production companies some good.

Tags: BitTorrent, BitTorrent files