Copyright Law

Report: File-Sharing Surges in Europe, Declines in US

By soulxtc

Says BitTorrent and eDonkey are used most, and that MIT tops the list of university’s with most copyright infringing material on their network.

Anti-piracy company BayTSP has released its new ?Online Trends & Insights” for 2008, and it offers up some interesting bits of data about the current state of P2P.

The report says that BitTorrent and eDonkey are the first and second most popular file-sharing applications respectively, and that while cases of copyright infringement in the US have dropped, they have surged in Spain, Italy and France.

?BitTorrent and eDonkey are optimized for large file distribution and, despite the growing popularity of streaming video, are still where the majority of copyright infringement takes place,? said BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa. ?The U.S., which topped the list of countries with the most infringements in 2007, dropped to No. 4 behind Spain, Italy and France.?

The report is based on cumulative data from all of BayTSP?s clients, which include movie studios, sports franchises, pay-per-view broadcasters, record labels, software companies, videogame developers and the publishing industry.

US ISPs Comcast, AT&T and Road Runner each had more than one million cases of copyright infringement of BayTSP clients’ content in 2008 while all of the top 10 international ISPs ? including top ranked Telefonica De Espana (Spain), Telecom Italia (Italy) and France Telecom ? had more than two million identified infringements each.

It also asserts that the average number of infringements found on domestic university networks has held relatively steady since 2006 and infringements found on international university networks have shown a slight decline from 2007. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington and Boston University topped the list of domestic infringements while University of Botswana, Uppsala University (Sweden) and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) topped the list of international infringements on university networks.

While the report is certainly biased and only includes data pertaining to the copyrighted material of its clients, it does help make the case that file-sharing in the US is not the problem that many make it out to be, and that ISP data capping or content filtering is totally unwarranted.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on May 13, 2009 (boomark / email).