AFACT repeats claims: over 90 percent of BitTorrent files breach copyright

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 20 September 2011 16:07

IT Policy - Regulation

Ever eager to highlight claims of rampant online copyright infringement, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has cited the results of a study that it says found that 97.2 percent of BitTorrent files breach copyright. Readers feeling a sense of déjà vu are entirely justified.

According to AFACT, "A new report released on 13 September has found that 97.2 percent of the most popular torrents are infringing copyright. The report also concludes that approximately 60 percent of popular torrents were infringing movie torrents. The report entitled 'Determining Infringing Content on BitTorrent Networks: Enhancing Sampling and Detecting Fake Files', was conducted by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) at the University of Ballarat."

It was just over a year ago, in July 2010, that AFACT welcomed the release of a research paper by the same organisation, by the same authors and still available on the AFACT web site  that estimated that at least 89 percent of traffic on BitTorrent, and possibly as much as 98 percent, was in breach of copyright. (The 10 percent uncertainty was the result of porn videos of which, in many cases "the provenance was unclear," ie the researchers were unable to determine whether they were pirated professional porn or non-copyright amateur porn videos.)

Commenting on the new report AFACT executive director Neil Gane said: "This report verifies conclusively that BitTorrent is used extensively for the illegal distribution and viewing of copyrighted movies and television shows."

So does this mean last year's report was inconclusive? Worse, it was deeply flawed, according to one commentator. Global BitTorrent news source TorrentFreak ridiculed the veracity of last year's study, labelling some of its claims "horribly wrong" and saysing that "mistake after mistake" had been made during its preparation.

TorrentFreak's editor in chief slammed ICSL's overall conclusion that almost all files on BitTorrent infringed copyright, with only a small percentage confirmed legal. "This statistic is grossly inaccurate, because it's based on the most popular files, of which many are fake," he wrote. "Bottom line is that this 'Academic' paper is one of the most inaccurate reports we've seen thus far."
 
The new report deals with these and other criticisms and claims that the new findings are based on an improved methodology. It concludes "Overall, the main valid criticism of the ICSL's previous studies can be directed at the lack of handling of outliers in the results, and that faked files were not accounted for. While both of these concerns have been addressed in this methodology, the overall conclusions - that a significant proportion of BitTorrent usage is copyright infringing and that movies account for a large proportion of that figure - remain the same, validated by this improved methodology."