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"While BitTorrent has many legitimate uses most data is transferred by pirated files." - is this just an assumption, or is there actual data to back this up? Se
by larrik 11y ago
"While BitTorrent has many legitimate uses most data is transferred by pirated files." - is this just an assumption, or is there actual data to back this up? Seems like it may not be the easiest thing to track (especially with a lot of people trying to claim all torrent traffic as piracy).
- Thaxll 11y agoLet's face it, 99% of torrent is copyrighted material. It's no secret.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoI'd wager that rates of copyright infringement over HTTP are also exorbitantly high (think of how frequently images are reproduced, for instance). This is the fallacy of equating a neutral distribution medium to the contents shared within.
- jhasse 11y agoIs World of Warcraft still using Bittorrent?
- ultramancool 11y agoNot sure if Blizzard still does, but even Windows 10 does peer to peer updating now.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoAmazon uses bittorrent to transfer things in their cloud as well.
- riskable 11y agoI'm guessing that actually 100% of BitTorrent traffic is of copyrighted material. There may be one or two torrents of content in the public domain but last I checked everything is copyrighted. Of course, whether or not something is copyrighted has very little to do with whether or not it is legal to distribute via BitTorrent.
- Xylakant 11y agoLet's face it, 101% of all numbers on the internet are made up. It's no secret.
- nitrogen 11y agoEspecially when preceded by "let's face it" or "let's be honest".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sp332 11y agoUnlicensed copyrighted material. Everything is copyrighted by default and almost nothing has expired yet. But if you get a distribution license, then it's not illegal to distribute copyrighted software.
- api 11y ago"While some hookahs are indeed used to smoke tobacco..."
- throwaway1119 11y agoMy startup monitors bittorrent traffic globally. 80,000 data points a second. I have been monitoring bittorrent traffic for 9 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As of this second, there are 9,151,043 torrents in the system. Out of the 9,151,043 torrents, 9,056,412 are pirated copies of either Software, Games, Music, Movies or TV. 98.9%
- mikeash 11y agoHow do the numbers look if you compare data transferred rather than just torrent count? Seems like that would be a better measure. I'd expect that to actually skew even more towards pirating, though.
- mirimir 11y agoWhat's the breakout on a throughput basis? I'm maybe a little surprised that Linux ISOs account for so little. But then, I'm obviously out of touch.
- larrik 11y agoI guess my question becomes, does the articles description of 'bittorrent' include all p2p file sharing? I feel like a ton of video games and even software like Linux use p2p for downloads and patching. Your answer was the sort of thing I was hoping for, although % of torrents may not be an accurate representation of share of traffic. Of course, it could very well be.
- Bedon292 11y agoDoes that take into account private trackers? And I too would like to know more about the actual amounts download.
- exelius 11y agoI would say that's a fairly accurate statement. While there are some legitimate users of BitTorrent (Blizzard is the most notable example) the vast majority of torrent traffic is pirated files. And it makes sense, as those pirated files have largely been driven away from being served over HTTP/HTTPS, whereas for "legal" file distribution, HTTP/HTTPS are often a lot easier to set up.