Torrentfreak Criticizes Anti-Piracy Research

[DeathKnell]

Torrentfreak, a leading bittorrent Web site, criticizes an anti-piracy study for being completely "inaccurate" and biased towards searching for copyright infringing torrents.

Torrentfreak says that technology news Web sites such as Ars Technica and ZDNet were "taken in" by a study from the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) that claimed that only 0.3 percent of Bittorrent files did not infringe on copyrights. Torrentfreak also notes that the report was pushed by AFACT, the anti-piracy outfit.

Torrentfreak, speaking through its blog, said that the report sought answers to four questions. The Web site says that the findings were incorrect due to inaccurate data and a flawed methodology.

Torrentfreak claims that ICSL's findings that there were slightly more than a million torrent files from 17 Bittorrent trackers last spring are incorrect.The Web site claims that the figure is only a small sample of what could have been found. Torrentfreak also says that the study was biased towards the most-seeded torrents such as TV and film.

The study also claimed that, at any time, a minimum of 117,420,061 files is shared. The Web site says that the figure is too high as it fails to take into account false seed counts. Torrentfreak says that the total is closer to somewhere between 10 and 20 million.

The Web stie also says that the survey findings were incorrect when it came to listing the top 10 most seeded torrents. Torrentfreak says that the data may be two years old and may have been obtained from a fake Bittorrent Tracker.

"Here the researchers conclude that 97.9% of all files on BitTorrent are copyright infringing, and only 0.3% confirmed 'legal'. Based on our previous conclusions it is hard to believe that these figures are even remotely accurate, and they aren't," the company said.

"There are too many flaws in the methodology to list here, but for one this statistic is grossly inaccurate because it's based on the most popular files, of which many are fake."

"The researchers should have at least tried to determine the percentage of infringing files on their whole (inaccurate) dataset instead of the most seeded ones (of which many are fake)."

Source: International Business Times AU

DeathKnell Reviewed by DeathKnell on 27th Jul 2010. Torrentfreak Criticizes Anti-Piracy Research Torrentfreak, a leading bittorrent Web site, criticizes an anti-piracy study for being completely "inaccurate" and biased towards searching for copyright infringing torrents. Torrentfreak says that technology news Web sites such as Ars Technica and ZDNet were "taken in" by a study from the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) that claimed that only 0.3 percent of Bittorrent files did not infringe on copyrights. Torrentfreak also notes that the report was pushed by AFACT, the Rating: 5

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