BitTorrent Use Up 24% Since November

dingalig writes "It looks as though the MPAA's fight against The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites isn't going very well. Ars Technica reports that BitTorrent traffic is up by 24% since before the holidays. 'BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January — about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes [BigChampagne CEO Eric] Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."'"

WGA Strike?

[LostMyBeaver (1226054)]

Sounds like people started downloading more films when the TV shows started running out.

I'm guessing this has more to do with the fact that when there's nothing on TV to watch, people are more likely to download a film.

MPAA should sue the WGA

Re:WGA Strike?

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo (1000167)]

I only download for the articles...

Re:WGA Strike?

[Digestromath (1190577)]

Yes... 700mb .avi articles about "Teenage Lesbians" and thier "Raunchy Shenanigans Vol.11." Must be a fantastic read judging from the abstract.

Re:WGA Strike?

[mutube (981006)]

Yes... 700mb .avi articles about "Teenage Lesbians" and thier "Raunchy Shenanigans Vol.11." Must be a fantastic read judging from the abstract.

Link please.

Re:

[icsx (1107185)]

I'm guessing this has more to do with the fact that when there's nothing on TV to watch, people are more likely to download a film.

Or Maybe they downloaded those TV-shows instead from TV? They air mainly on US only so rest of the world gets to wait from 6 months to 2 years usually until they see the same episodes, unless, of course they use bittorrent.

Mainstream now...

[ArIck (203)]

With all the publicity TPB et al has gotten with those ridiculous actions of MPAA, BitTorrent is now a mainstream. The same thing happened with Napster and the same thing would happen with private torrent sites when MPAA starts attacking them.

Re:Mainstream now...

[Chief Wongoller (1081431)]

Actually, bittorrent is not yet a mainstream, but it will be. An average of 8.2 million downloaders at any one time may seem a lot until you consider that there are nearly 350 million broadband subscribers worldwide (wikkepedia). So only 2.4 percent are downloading at any one time. This percentage can only grow and surely will grow considerably, not because people want stuff for free (but that is nice), but because only bittorent can truly let us watch what we want when we want. Who wants to go back to old tv, that dictates to you when you watch, when watching bittorent files is so more flexible? Not me. I'm really suprised that more people don't use it, but I know as soon as people try it, theyr'e hooked and there's no going back. The tide will be unstoppable and those folk blind to its inevitability are just a bunch of Canutes.

Re:Mainstream now...

[ArIck (203)]

BitTorrent is as mainstream as YouTube is. With 100 million views a day at YouTube (wikipedia), it averages to less than 8.2 million at any one time making BT more popular than YouTube.

And yes I agree with you.... BT could only go up

Re:Mainstream now...

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

Youtube is just a bunch of crap now. If their execs were smart then they would make deals with the content providers instead of bending over backwards in the face of every takedown notice. They could improve video quality and have a free section and a pay section. They could offer bulk or single-watch streaming packages or bill based on monthly bandwidth. People are willing to pay for a decent, easily accesable solution('Torrent rocks but it's usually far from convenient). People would pay a little extra to not have to have 20 different accounts with 20 different providers. Until somebody comes up with a feasible multimedia streaming or download solution, I'll be firing up the 'Torrent.

Bittorrent via Miro

[Burz (138833)]

Miro is a video feed aggregator, player, search tool, downloader with torrent support; recently out of beta and has improved a lot.

The Miro folks [getmiro.org] are even trying to help people distribute their videos via bittorrent, esp. as a way to get full SD and HD shows published at low cost.

It kind of competes with Youtube, but with better video quality. It even handles feeds from Youtube.

Re:

[Hatta (162192)]

Youtube is just a bunch of crap now.

Now?

Re:

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

I can see why you're posting as anonymous. Obviously you've never waited a week for that one person who has that one piece you need to finally get online. Maybe it's fast for you because you like the crap that's popular at the moment, like American Idol or America's top *.

Re:

[Hatta (162192)]

Solution, use torrent sites that enforce ratios. If people have to share back, or lose access to the site, torrents become much better seeded.

Of course, this requires you to not be a leech. Is that not convenient?

Re:Mainstream now...

[somersault (912633)]

So you're saying that this could be the year of BitTorrent on the desktop?

Victimless

[Repton (60818)]

"We need to highlight that [copyright infringement] is not a victimless crime and take appropriate actions."

Anyone know any victims? Artists or creators whose works are widely pirated but who struggle to make a living?

Re:Victimless

[mollymoo (202721)]

You seem to be implying that depriving someone of something doesn't make them a victim as long as it doesn't leave them struggling to survive. Which is of course complete and utter bullshit.

Re:Victimless

[PeterKraus (1244558)]

That is true, though, only if we accept premise "sharing is immoral" as true. Isn't it worse to deprive your friend of something you have, than deprive multinational companies of money they are ripping off authors and are based on twisted laws of copyrights and patents anyway?

Re:

[MttJocy (873799)]

Seams to me that copyright was and is doomed to failure on the simple grounds of human nature, human culture exists exactly because humans enjoy sharing ideas, creativity influences etc that have meaning to them with others this is how influences get spread within a culture and become identifiable attributes of that culture without that aspect of human nature culture and society itself would completely fail to function properly neither can happen if influences and ideas are not shared between the members of

Re:Victimless

[evanbd (210358)]

Ideas are owned by society. They are what make up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let their creator exercise some limited degree of control over them. That does not mean any one person can own an idea any more than they can own a sunset.

Your labor is owned by society

[patio11 (857072)]

It is what makes up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let the laborer execercise some limited degree of control over the fruits of the labor. This does not mean any one person can own their labor, any more than they can own a sunset.

There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...

I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be a

Re:Your labor is owned by society

[evanbd (210358)]

No, ideas and physical objects are fundamentally different. I see nothing wrong with limited term copyrights -- 20 years, maybe less. Tell me, in what way would your incentive to create software be diminished if you could only hold the copyright for 20 years? Do you have any belief that you can make money from the 20 year old version of your software? If not, why shouldn't it pass into the public domain?

Ownership of physical objects makes sense because if I take your car, then you no longer have a car. If I copy your software... you still have your software. So there's no fundamental moral argument for the ownership of software. There is, however, a strong practical (not moral or ethical) argument for ownership of limited term copyrights, intended to promote creation of such works.

Re:

[Hucko (998827)]

I'd love to be able to make money off software too, but for the fact it just seems wrong to charge for something that is infinitely reproducible. For my service and effort, sure. But that decreases on average for every copy made. Give me the ability to transfer >$1AUD with no fees, I'll pay for every song I would then download, 8$ per movie. Few, if any, media files are worth more in the current environment. What, your going to sulk and 'not create'? I'll live.

Its like garbage, if there are plenty of bi

Re:Victimless

[evanbd (210358)]

It has been codified. Look at the form of the copyright and patent laws -- they don't grant ownership of the idea at all. Look at the justification in the Constitution -- the premise is that copyright and patent require explicit permission from the constitution to exist at all, since they go *against* the natural way of doing things (ie ideas owned by society). Look at the writing of the founders discussing the matter, and you see the same concept -- patents and copyrights are limited term monopolies, granted because it is useful to do so, not because of any inherent right of ownership.

The views I espouse form the very core of our copyright and patent systems; they have merely been forgotten by the public, while a very well-funded campaign attempts to dismantle them entirely. Perhaps it has succeeded, and we as a society have changed our minds -- but if that is the case, it needs to be expressed in very forceful terms -- specifically, a constitutional amendment permitting unlimited term copyright.

Re:

[DocEye (1041990)]

Theft is theft. Period. If you don't like it, change the law.

And by changing the law, theft wouldn't be theft anymore? That's hypocrisy!

Re:Victimless

[MikeFM (12491)]

It's like victimizing royalty by taking away land they aren't using so that commoners can hunt for food. Sure then they might not have quite so much bounty going to waste but then who cares? I'm not going to spend my time, energy, and money defending them.

Being civilized means respecting the rights of others to life and liberty - it doesn't mean giving others the right to be rich. I have no problem with people being rich but I feel no need to defend their wealth. I don't believe that being rich makes them more productive so from my point of view it's better if they have to continue struggling for their wealth by doing useful things like producing more music, movies, and other cultural resources. Sitting on their ass enjoying their wealth isn't really a boon for humanity although most of us wouldn't mind being able to do so.

Re:Victimless

[Marcus Green (34723)]

Why the analogy with Royalty. Why do you think that this only affects rich people. Do you think that only rich people create content? There are millions of people who only make a modest income from creative content that are affected by copyright laws and their enforcement. The emphasis on rich people smacks of resentment.

Re:Victimless

[Plutonite (999141)]

Or maybe he's implying, correctly, that sharing digital information for free does not deprive anyone of anything, let alone make them penniless.

Re:Victimless

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

Well the point is more "right now this is illegal but this is sustainable for everyone so why not change the law ?"

Re:

[jamesh (87723)]

If there was a way for me to legally watch my favourite TV shows within a reasonable time of the episodes first airing I wouldn't have a use for BitTorrent at all.

I'm guessing here that you are probably my age (32) or younger. I'm at the older end of the generation that, for some reason, seems to want everything right now. A new series comes out and we have to have it right now, not when our local TV broadcaster gets around to showing it. Even though there is plenty of stuff to do in the meantime, and the s

there you have it - a victim

[commodoresloat (172735)]

Lately I've been downloading Gilligan's Island.

You should be ashamed of yourself. If it wasn't for your downloading, Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island would never have turned to drugs. Thanks to you and your ilk, she was busted smoking pot in her car [ktvb.com], no doubt contemplating how illegal downloading has destroyed her life.

Holiday TV sucks

[Fluffeh (1273756)]

Well, the proof is clearly in the pudding. If school holidays didn't mark the end of anything decent on the tele I can assure you that the hoards of people wouldn't be racing off to download something better off the net than the horrid renditions of Dickens Christmas Carol being shown on the box.

Prohibitions encourage what is prohibited

[frkbros44 (1269342)]

The current authoritarian tactics are an obvious failure, and are causing substantial collateral damage to innocent victims of miss-targeted enforcement efforts. The solution isn't more of the same, but rather to accommodate human nature and evolving technology.

The only reason why P2P file sharing is a problem is because copyrights have been extended into perpetual special privileges. Copyrights were only needed in the first place due to the limitations of physical media and the brick and mortar distribution system. Both of those are now obsolete - as are the artificial market distortions justified by their limitations.

Just as the Internet offers a far more efficient distribution system, it also offers the ability to shorten the time require for a creator to recover fair value for his work before releasing (some) rights to the public domain. A modified dutch auction over the Internet provides the means for artists to be fully compensated at the moment they finish their creation. Once the artist has received fair value for a recorded performance, there isn't any need to attempt to control how consumers choose to use that recording. The P2P file sharing that today is called piracy, and used to justify ever more abusive intrusions into the rights of all people in order to enforce unnecessary copyright restrictions, becomes highly valuable viral promotion and distribution that benefits the artist.

Remember that the artist has already been cut of meaningful earnings from the reproduction and sale of recordings by the typical "all rights" contract terms imposed by the legacy record labels. Only a tiny percentage of artists earn a living from royalties on their recordings. For most artists, the primary benefit of selling records is just the publicity - they still make most of their money from live performances. File sharing and "word of mouth" on the Internet are much more effective promotion than the paid advertising of the legacy labels.

Re:Prohibitions encourage what is prohibited

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

What difference is there between making a physical _copy_ and an electronic one.

A physical copy always has an incremental cost - that of the physical medium.
An electronic copy has an incremental cost so small that it is typically in the noise.

Re:

[frkbros44 (1269342)]

The core objectives of copyrights and patents are essentially the same - to encourage creativity and benefit the public good. Creativity is encouraged by allowing the creator a monopoly right to exploit his work product for long enough to extract fair value. In return for this limited period of protection, the creator's work becomes public domain.

It was specifically the expected benefit to the public good of timely transfer to the public domain of technical knowledge and creative works that justified the

Getting the old folks on BitTorrent

[PRlME (871868)]

My 65 year-old parents recently asked me how they could also watch all the shows & movies that I've been downloading all these years. So being the good son that I am, I set them up with uTorrent, the appropriate bookmarks, VLC, and a tutorial on how to handle everything. They were quite happy. :)

Not all trafic is illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure - P2P has increased, but more and more software vendors are distributing their software using Bittorrent.

So saying an increase in P2P traffic is equivalent to a increase of illegal streams in not at all correct. A lot of Linux vendors also use P2P to distribute their distro's. A lot of them are about 4Gb in size, so that would be a nice increase of traffic. Also you will notice an increase of traffic within a few day's when the latest Ubuntu hit the web...

And it's not only the Open Source vendors that are using this distribution method. More and more Closed Source software makers ar starting to use this distribution channel, simply because it lowers the cost...

So - saying an increase of P2P traffic is the same as an increase of illegal content is absolutely not true!

Not all torrents are piracy!

[MichaelCrawford (610140)]

BitTorrent is crucial for the economical distribution of large-filesize media. Many Open Source and Free Software publishers use BitTorrent to distribute their installers. Jamendo [jamendo.com], a distributor of Creative Commons-licensed music, uses both BitTorrent and eMule.

BitTorrent is also critical to unsigned musicians such as myself who offer downloads of their music [geometricvisions.com] from their websites. P2P allows bandwidth to be contributed by one's fans, whereas direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling artist if one of their tracks becomes a sudden hit.

And yes I know there are many music hosting sites such as MySpace. But it's better for musicians to offer downloads from their own sites rather than to use a host.

Private bittorrent networks

[GNUPublicLicense (1242094)]

As a security and privacy feature, people shall now start to deploy full encrypted trackers on which only people they know can connect to (password or PSK). And that additionally to "public" trackers. Another thing, some transports should be able to hide randomly torrent traffic in well known protocols in order to avoid CPU efficient detection. Torrent traffic means data and control stuff from the tracker and other peers. The idea is to make tracking torrent users unreasonable and inefficient regarding net performance. Namely, torrent user tracking will cost a lot and would kill net efficiency.

Sorry, everyone!

[rubicon7 (51782)]

I'll throttle my client back a bit.

Yarr, scurvy MPAA will be dancing the hempen jig.

[falsemover (190073)]

In Australia a CD / DVD be around $40 (about US$37). Since this represents about $37 o' pure greed, it's no wonder t' people be votin' with their mouse. I say, when t' sea be rough, jump on t' starboard ship.

Arrr, ahoy landlubbers, we be PIRATES and YOU MPAA will be dancing the hempen jig.

When talking about BitTorrent...

[the_arrow (171557)]

Things are happening in the case against The Pirate Bay. One of the police officers involved in the investigation now works for Warner Brothers in Sweden. See here [thelocal.se] for more info.

Most torrents ARE 'piracy'

[HetMes (1074585)]

Don't try and make a point about torrents not being 'piracy' by mentioning a few users who downloaded a Linux distro last winter. Anyone knows it's a flawed argument; they're statistically irrelevant anecdotes. Remember those words, as they apply in almost any debate where a general statement is made, and some not too bright person tries to refute it.

Re:Most torrents ARE 'piracy'

[JasterBobaMereel (1102861)]

From the list of torrents downloaded please subtract

Linux Distributions
Other 'free' Software
Non-Copyright Music
Non-Copyright Movies
Creative Commons Content

You still have a very large number of downloads ...but then how many of these people would have bought the content they downloaded?

The industry always complains that they have lost $x million in sales but they do not allow for the fact that the vast majority of the downloaders would never buy what they downloaded?

Mandriva Spring Edition must be popular

[flyingfsck (986395)]

Well, obviously lots of people must be downloading the latest Mandriva Linux...

Re:Gotta love statistics.

[FoolsGold (1139759)]

If they're counting all torrents, then yes the content/patches of WoW would certainly count for a fair bit.

But you'd have to be rather naive to think Linux distros and other legal content (not including WoW) are in any way a measurable part of the total torrent traffic. I have no stats of course (this is Slashdot), except to say that whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.

Re:Gotta love statistics.

[richie2000 (159732)]

That could simply be because Linux distros don't need to use TPB since they have their own trackers.

Re:

[FoolsGold (1139759)]

OK, so Linux distros are most commonly obtained through torrents. I happen to agree with that.

But Linux users are so incredibly insignificant to the OVERALL amount of torrent traffic, that this fact has no relevance.

Dumbass? I think you're more of a dumbfuck here mate.

Re:

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

Add up the numbers for the top 500 illegal torrents on Pirate Bay and all the other torrent sites and I bet you'll get a much bigger total bandwidth than this. Popular TV shows and movies can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of downloaders. And that is happening 24/7, not just on a release.

Please, it's ridiculous to claim that the majority of torrent bandwidth is used for legal content. And it's pointless too. No one from the MPAA/RIAA is going to come one here and stop harassing pirates just because

Like churchill said

[Cryacin (657549)]

I don't trust any statistic that I didn't make up myself.

Re:

[CRCulver (715279)]

While packaging whole seasons together can be convenient, it really sucks that it's difficult to find an individual episode of a series if it isn't relatively new. I was searching long and hard for a torrent of the Season 6 episode of The Simpsons "Bart vs. Australia", but I ended up having to download all of season six just to watch one episode. That's a waste of bandwidth (though luckily my ISP seems not to care about my 100GB/month habit).