Are Only 0.3% of Torrents Legal?

I’m sure this will come as a surprise to no one, but a popular use for the BitTorrent protocol is downloading illegal materials, whether they be movies, music, games, applications, books or any other piece of copyrighted digital property. You probably also realize that the effect of this is huge, and in the grand torrenting scheme, downloading pirated materials simply dwarfs any legal use, unfortunately.

The result of yet another research study, the “Internet Commerce Security Laboratory” out of the University of Ballarat in Australia has concluded that 0.3% of the files available for torrenting can be confirmed as being legal. As mentioned, it’s no surprise to see a huge number associated with illegal downloads, but 99.7% is a little on the extreme side.

The report was constructed by visiting a popular torrent tracker and viewing the top 1,000 available torrents. Of these, 890 files were confirmed to be illegal, while the rest, aside from 3, were assumed to be infringing. So, to be fair, some may not have been infringing at all, but chances are good that they are. Even some “amateur” porn the researchers found could be interpreted as being without a copyright, but further investigation found that to be not be the case at all.

I’m without doubt that many, many people use torrents for piracy, but I have to raise questions about the absolute validity of the study. It seems as though that just one site or tracker was examined, which automatically rules out another popular torrent use… downloading Linux distros or other legal downloads not usually found on a be-all torrent site. After all, if you are going to download openSUSE 11.3, are you going to go to The Pirate Bay, or openSUSE.org? I think the answer is obvious.

Basically, the 89 percent is a baseline number when it came to infringing files, and the three most shared categories were movies, music, and TV shows—among those categories, there were zero legal files being shared. Assuming all 16 files of ambiguous legality were in fact legal, the researchers said that there was an overall figure of 97.9 percent infringing content being distributed on BitTorrent.