Over the years, many Internet traffic reports have been published. Back in 2004, long before the BitTorrent boom had started, studies already indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic.

Since then, we’ve seen a couple of dozen reports, all with a totally different outcome. Some estimate that P2P traffic represents approximately 50% of the total traffic, while others go as high as 85%, or as low as 20%. The overall consensus seems to be that there is little consensus, or is there?

We think we might have spotted a trend, not so much in the data, but in the companies that publish these reports. Most Internet traffic research is conducted by companies that offer traffic shaping and broadband management solutions. Cachelogic, Ipoque, Sandvine, they all sell (or sold) products that help ISPs to manage their traffic.

Consequently, it is not a big surprise that their presentation of the results is often a little biased. After all, it is in their best interests to overestimate the devastating effects P2P traffic has, and convince ISPs that they need to throttle these awful bandwidth hogs.

Or as Sandvine co-founder Dave Caputo puts it: “Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization. This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage.”

In Sandvine’s report we see that P2P represents less than a quarter of all downstream traffic, and even less during peak times. Web traffic is most dominant and online media streaming sites take up nearly 16%.

On the upstream side, P2P traffic takes up 61% of all traffic (the black makes it even more scary), followed by web-browsing, tunneling and VoIP traffic.

Interestingly, the amount of bandwidth that is transferred on the Internet has more than quadrupled since the first reports came out a few years ago, and it is likely to quadruple again in only a few years. Unlike Sandvine suggests, throttling is not the solution. Investing in the network is.

Post from: TorrentFreak

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‘Shocking’ 61% of all Upstream Internet Traffic is P2P torrent downloads.

The UK’s Performing Rights Society (PRS) is a non-profit organization, setup to ensure that the music industry continues to make plenty more profits on an on-going regular basis. For years now, they have collected license fees from companies that use music as part of their businesses, such as pubs, clubs and restaurants. Some might argue that these type of companies benefit commercially from playing music to the public, so a license fee, although not particular popular, can be absorbed as a legitimate business expense.

However, recently the PRS has been getting more and more aggressive in its quest to funnel cash to its paymasters. It now sees every UK organization - commercial or otherwise - as a legitimate target to intimidate with threats of legal action, should they dare to play a radio, TV or DVD within earshot of the public without a license. Small businesses playing the radio for personal entertainment to pass the working day, charities, tea rooms, corner shops and even community centers are being targeted by this outfit. Bizarrely, they are currently going after the British police, who have been refusing to pay. It’s clear, they care about just one thing - money.

To get this money the PRS go after people like the 61 year-old mechanic Paul Wilson, who has worked alone at his garage for 23 years since he was 15. He can’t afford the PRS license, so now he has to work in silence. “When I was first contacted by the PRS I thought somebody was having a laugh with me,” he said. But really, this is no laughing matter. After the demands for money, Mr Wilson told the PRS to take his radio to prove he wasn’t listening to it, but the PRS warned that the police could come round to do spot checks. Meanwhile, the garage next door to Mr Wilson also received a PRS letter, so they are maintaining radio silence too. Just regular people trying to earn a living, being chased down for money to listen to a radio at work. It’s astonishing.

When the small guy gets hit by these type of issues it really annoys people in the copyright debating community. However, if you really want to widen the debate and spread some really bad PR, it’s going to take tactics which show how low you are prepared to go. For instance, you could go after a charity trying to raise funds via a tea-room, discover their staff radio can be overheard, and demand money from them.

But it is possible to further outrage people. And this is what these type of collection outfits are doing, by widening their campaigns to start going after the softest most impressionable target in the country - kids. Last week we reported how the MPLC, a Hollywood royalty collection outfit, (illegally) demanded money from kindergartens in Ireland, so that the kids could watch DVDs there.

But going after children isn’t exclusively an MPLC tactic, the PRS are doing it too. Part of the claim against the tea-rooms mentioned above was that the kids there needed to be licensed to sing carols in front of the public and now, to add insult to injury, the PRS ‘non-profit’ copyright cop is going after a kid’s non-profit community center in Glasgow, Scotland. The Yoker Resource Centre is faced with a £3,000 bill, it if wants to carry on using its TV, radio or CD player, that is.

Elizabeth Busby, the after-school supervisor at the center told ClydeBank Post: “We can’t afford to pay this money. Although we have a TV license for the center, under these rules we cannot let all the kids watch it.”

Wondering (like the rest of us in the sane world) why people have to pay twice or more for using the same product, Ms Busby added: “If the children are watching a DVD then I have gone out and paid for it, so whether it is one person or twenty-five I still paid for it. It’s not as if I’m buying pirate copies or downloading them illegally. Soon it will be the Halloween party and what do we do for music?”

Asked to comment, the PRS declined. I’d like to think that the silence is down to shame, but I doubt it. I’ll leave you with some comments from Steve Pendlebury, writing in The Bolton News:

“Radio stations pay large amounts of money to licensing organizations PRS and PPL for the music they play, and music has been on the radio for many years. During the war, there were programmes like Workers Playtime and Music While You Work. Now, many radio stations have features about workplaces. If the PRS force people to switch their radios off then how are these stations going to survive?

Music has to be heard before people go out and buy it.”

Post from: TorrentFreak

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Copyright Cops Target Kids’ Schools and Community Centers torrent downloads.

No matter where the story originates, be it the UK, USA, Italy, Asia, or Australia, it reads the same. A raid is carried out, assisted by members of the local anti-piracy lobby group. From Oink, to The Pirate Bay, these raids are consistently getting assistance and ‘evidence’ from those that claim to be losing out to the targets of these raids.

Some might think that this is acceptable - maybe police forces are not equipped to deal with highly technical cases like this, and so need to outsource to specialist agencies like these for help? This is certainly not the case, as many countries have specialist departments that are highly experienced and qualified in the forensic examination of computers and technology. The problem is more real. Interest groups that claim to be the victim - are allowed to participate in the prosecution of their targets.

In most police investigations, if a police officer is directly involved in a crime, he or she is usually unable to participate in the investigation as being involved reduces (or even eliminates) that person’s objectivity. Justice is meant to be blind, not fueled by thoughts of personal redemption or vengeance. However, time and time again we see ‘investigators’ for the MPAA or RIAA pop up in cases. Often they will state they (or their members) have had losses, thus making them the victim. If you believe that someone has caused you or your members a loss, are you going to act from that basis when gathering evidence, or will you work as hard to find the person innocent as you will to find them guilty?

While the problem is growing worse, it is doing so in only a limited way. It is only apparent in the gray area that is copyright infringement. Could you imaging the outcry in the UK, if anti-speed organization BRAKE was involved in investigating road traffic accidents? If they were, would a large percentage of accident investigations involving them find causes related to the organizations policy and positions? No police department anywhere in the world would consider requesting a Greenpeace investigator when looking into flytipping. So, why are media industry groups treated differently, when it comes to anything involving copyright?

The reason We’ve raised this is because of an incident in the US that caught our eye. A motorist driving in Park Forest, Il – a town some 30 miles south of Chicago – was pulled over for speeding. With an apparent suspended license he was arrested. The car was searched, and that’s where a few spindles of CDs and DVDs were found. The spindles had handwritten markings, labeling them as movies and music.

Surprisingly enough police called in the RIAA, a rather biased lobby group, to investigate the incident. As a result, the speeding motorist’s house was searched, and two of the 6 charges against him are relating to copyright. Whether the motorist turned out to be a commercial pirate or not is irrelevant, the fact that the police and the RIAA cooperate like this is what worries us. They might be searching iPods next.

Requests to Park Forest Police Chief Thomas Fleming have gone unanswered, and no trace of the RIAA investigator can be found either. It proves though, that no matter where you are, there is little chance of of a fair investigation if you’re accused of copyright infringement.

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RIAA: Lobbyists or Law Enforcers? torrent downloads.

If the UK government suddenly announced that it was bringing in legislation to criminalize personal-use non-profit file-sharing, there would probably be an uproar, probably supported by me. The thought of a petty file-sharer up in a criminal court facing a magistrate or judge seems outrageous.

However, the thought of Miss Isabella Barwinska picking up a £16,000 bill from the civil courts recently for sharing one £10 game is outrageous too, but maybe even more so. Miss Barwinska didn’t turn up or defend her case, no-one seems to know why, but for a lot of people facing similar actions, the prospect of facing a legal system they don’t understand and can’t afford to participate in, financial issues are at the forefront of doing nothing about the threatening letters.

These people simply cannot defend themselves and this is why it might make sense to criminalize personal-use file-sharing. In a criminal case if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you by the state and you get the benefit of proper justice at least, a right of reply within a proper structure, not grubby threatening letters designed to wear people down.

I’ll let you into a little secret. When people say file-sharing is “as bad as shoplifting”, in the UK that comparison is pretty ridiculous. Many shoplifters are let off with a simple caution and even the most persistent would have to be uniquely unlucky to get fined £6,000 (plus £10,000 costs) for a £10 game. If Miss Barwinska had been caught physically stealing it, a police caution would be likely, or perhaps a very small fine. In the ‘real-world’ she’d need to smash through the storefront with a truck to end up with a fine the size of the one she got.

The other reason why there might be benefits in bringing file-sharing out of the civil domain and into the criminal is because even fairly large-scale commercial piracy on and off the Internet is treated with extreme leniency in the UK.

Last week we reported that the UK’s Hull city council said it had such a massive piracy problem at its biggest market in Walton Street, it had to ban legitimate traders too in order to stamp it out. Well, it seems that a part of this ‘problem’ was one Robert Guiness.

Mr Guiness had been using the Internet to download movies, music and computer games which he then burned onto DVD and CD and sold them at Walton Street market. When the police searched his van and raided his house, they found over 10,000 pirate movies, more than 600 audio CDs, a couple of hundred DVDs filled with MP3s and 283 computer games. He was a commercial pirate and his long-term considered actions certainly contrast nicely with Miss Barwinska’s civil tort involving a £10 game uploaded for one second.

So, taking Miss Barwinska’s punishment as a guide, presumably Mr Guiness should enjoy a minimum fine of 283 games at £6,000 each? Plus the movies and music. Oh boy, Mr Guiness would be in some big kind of trouble if Davenport Lyons had got to him first. Luckily for him, he got arrested by the police instead and had the good fortune of having a criminal trial.

Due to the “exceptional circumstances” in the case (”i’m but a small cog in a big machine guv’nor”), he was given a suspended sentence and walked out of the court a free man. No fine.

Just to be clear, I don’t really want file-sharing criminalized and I certainly don’t want the UK courts jammed full of petty file-sharing cases. For their part, the police don’t even have time to come to household burglaries or car thefts, so we could never waste their time on non-profit file-sharing issues. However, I wonder how many of the UK’s ‘pinball pirates’ would wish they could be labeled a criminal in order to be excused a massive fine, picking up a criminal record in the process but walking away a free person instead? Desperate people will do desperate things - people have committed suicide over smaller debts than this. No-one in financial difficulty should ever have to aspire to criminal status in order to mount a defense, or aspire to a criminal conviction like that of Mr Guiness, in order to be treated with leniency.

But hold on just one moment. What about the OiNK users that are currently the subject of police criminal action for uploading ONE album each. Has petty file-sharing already become a criminal offense? The Crown Prosecution Service seems to think so.

In a country like Britain, which prides itself on its sense of justice and fairness, it can’t be right to have such a huge imbalance in the legal system, where an ordinary single mother of two making a single mistake is treated more harshly than a for-profit criminal like Mr Guiness. Equally, how can one set of file-sharers be the subject of a simple ISP ‘warning letter‘, another pick up a £16,000 bill and others get hauled off to the police station for interrogation, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and subsequent trial, for the same offenses?

It’s crystal clear - to the man in the street the legal system to deal with file-sharing right now in the UK seems just about as clear as mud and maybe, just maybe, it’s time for the government to step and decide once and for all. Should file-sharers be warned, bankrupted or jailed? Don’t forget Mr Brown, there are an estimated 6 million of them. Choose wisely.

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Is it Time To Make File-Sharing a Criminal Offense? torrent downloads.

Reports about the new and upcoming legal P2P service “Playlouder” are all over the news - again. Just like three years ago, Playlouder co-founder Paul Sanders manages to generate buzz for his legalized filesharing service. “We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months,” he said, claiming that his company made a deal with one of the top ISPs in the UK.

The idea is simple; Playlouder plans to offer subscribers of one of the larger ISPs in the UK a service that will allow them to pirate as much music as they want, for a flat fee. Customers will be allowed to use the BitTorrent sites and filesharing applications they are used to. Through Deep Packet Inspection, Playlouder will check what tracks you download, so they can pay the rights holder accordingly.

The idea of creating a service where users can use BitTorrent sites without having to worry about legal repercussions is interesting. However, despite 5 years of development, the Playlouder team is overlooking some of the most basic features of file-sharing, which will render the service useless. Playlouder will allow its subscribers to download content from BitTorrent, but they won’t allow them to share the files with others who do not use the service. This restriction is needed because they want to prevent copyright infringement, but it causes a few problems too.

Thou shalt share

The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share - upload files to others - your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.

BitTorrent Abusers

Torrent sites are not too fond of people who aim to abuse the system. It wouldn’t surprise me if most trackers ban Playlouder customers from accessing the service, as they will seriously hurt the download speed of the swarm, and thus the average downloader. What they’re technically offering is a Freeleech service, one which doesn’t share back to the community. Together with the decreased download speeds, this means that Playlouder users will not get to enjoy the BitTorrent experience that everyone else gets. In fact, it will be almost impossible for them to download anything from BitTorrent.

Encryption

Another issue, not so much related to the user experience, is that Playlouder will not be able to track what people are downloading when they enable protocol header encryption. A significant number of BitTorrent users are using encryption to prevent ISPs from throttling their traffic, but since encryption obfuscates the protocol headers, Playlouder can’t track what their users are downloading. This then means that artists and labels will not be fully compensated for the tracks these users download.

Let us be clear, we do encourage the search for new business models here at TorrentFreak, where ideally, both artists and consumers benefit. However, in its current form the Playlouder service is not going to be a great success, if it is more than just another “vaporshare” service in the first place.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail

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Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail torrent downloads.

When BuckCherry found out that their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they didn’t try to cover this up, or take the file down. No, instead, they issued a press release, where they stated: “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

This is strange to say the least. Not only because their label, Atlantic Records, is known to release (and spam) tracks for free on BitTorrent sites, but also because the press release was more about promoting the band than the actual leak. Without any hard evidence, we suggested that this leak may have been set up to get some free promotion and publicity, which BuckCherry seems to need.

Out of curiosity, we decided to follow this up, to see if this was indeed the case. With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme - who happens to live in New York - an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

Epic fail….

Unfortunately Klemme only replied once, and ignored all further requests to comment on this issue. However, the press release, sent out by Atlantic Records and BuckCherry, seems to be a promotional stunt. It could be that the manager acted on his own, and that the band and the record label were not not in on this, but that’s less plausible.

Klemme has been caught with his pants down, and he will probably think twice before he tries to pull off a stunt like this again. A song doesn’t leak by itself and pirates don’t have some sort of superhuman ability to get their hands on pre-release material. No, most leaked movies, TV-shows and albums come from the inside so blaming pirates is useless.

Of course, it’s great that BuckCherry can get some free promotion for the band using BitTorrent, and we encourage everyone to promote their band or movie via this great system too. But wouldn’t it be more constructive if bands embraced the technology and admitted it, instead of playing the injured party and giving the protocol a bad image, just to boost their own? There’s a great opportunity here, don’t waste it.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Band Leaks Track to BitTorrent, Blames Pirates

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Band Leaks Track to BitTorrent, Blames Pirates torrent downloads.

Leaks of pre-release material onto the Internet are pretty normal events these days. Even the mainstream media are happy to cover the big leaks, usually while portraying file-sharers as the son of the devil. In the past many file-sharing news sites have covered such leaks of movies and music as a matter of course, but as they become more prevalent, less people report on them.

Normally the approaches of the mainstream (and the bands, artist and labels) and that of the file-sharing community are pretty much opposite. On the one hand piracy is killing everything it touches. On the other hand, the file-sharing hand, it’s something totally different - free promotion and all-important publicity for the artists.

Our regular readers will know that the relatively unknown Indiana Gregg did rather well from her recent experiences with piracy, thanks largely to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak and dozens of other sites. And she’s not on her own, many other artists have benefited from piracy.

Some of these people are openly happy with their ‘piracy’ successes, others complain like crazy. Interestingly (and this is an opinion piece so feel free to disagree) we now appear to have a third type of piracy complainer - the complain-like-crazy-but-secretly-love-it type.

Enter ‘BuckCherry‘. I haven’t been (un)fortunate enough to hear anything from them but according to Wikipedia they are a hard/alternative rock band. They claim to be pretty mad that a track entitled “Too Drunk…” from their latest album “Black Butterfly” has started cropping up on BitTorrent sites, way in advance of its September 15th release date. This is what the band has to say:

“Too Drunk…,” a featured track from “BLACK BUTTERFLY,” recently appeared online at a number of BitTorrent sites. Buckcherry has released an official statement regarding the song’s unscheduled arrival, declaring, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

There is an old saying, “Least said, soonest mended“, but clearly BuckCherry have never heard of this saying or the concept, since they didn’t just comment casually on the leak, but shouted it from the rooftops in a fully-blown Atlantic Records press release. They mention the leak in the opening paragraph:

Buckcherry Reveals “BLACK BUTTERFLY”; Platinum-Certified Hard Rockers Announce New Album as “Too Drunk…” Appears Online;

…and then go on to mention the actual network (BitTorrent) in the second paragraph detailed above, which is not a particularly smart move if you’re trying to dissuade file-sharers from the inevitable free download. Adding further fuel to the already smoldering pile of suspicion is the fact that it’s possible for fans who preorder to get the “Too Drunk…” track for free.

I may be completely wrong in coming to the conclusion that BuckCherry has (cleverly?) manipulated 30 million world-wide file sharers into sampling their work through their faux displeasure in this press release. I may be wrong that Indiana Gregg is quietly enjoying all the extra publicity afforded to her by piracy.

But of course, the BitTorrent community wouldn’t fall for such a cynical ploy and the file-sharing press wouldn’t fall for it either, we’re not that stupid.

Hmmmm….

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Does BuckCherry Think The BitTorrent Community is Stupid?

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Does BuckCherry Think The BitTorrent Community is Stupid? torrent downloads.

A few days later, and those same offenses are now just worthy of a simple warning - confusing times.

Today, the strange world of copyright has the music industry threatening those it has encouraged to work for them in the OiNK case - the police.

UK music licensing outfit the “Performing Right Society” (PRS) - the guys that come asking for money when you play any music within earshot of the public - is rolling out the big guns ready for a High Court showdown with a little known group of music pirates, known in the UK as ‘the police’. Not the band of the same name, but that government organization people rely on for keeping law and order.

According to a report, the police in the county of Lancashire have apparently committed a terrible crime and let the whole country down. Rather like the copyright infringing tea-rooms and their carol-singing occupants we wrote about last year, it appears that the police have been recklessly listening to music in stations all over the county - without a license. The PRS aren’t happy.

Chief Constable Steve Finnigan is the guy being held accountable for this awful breach of copyright across 34 police stations in his county. One shudders to think of the damage that these boys-in-blue have caused the industry, as they coincidentally listen to the radio at the same time as serving the citizens of Britain. But it doesn’t stop there - according to a High Court writ, unlicensed music has also been played in police gyms, conferences, presentations and office parties.

As if things aren’t bad enough, there are worrying claims that telephone callers to police stations were put on hold and forced to listen to unlicensed music while they waited to report crimes. The trauma of ‘holding music’ is bad enough, but throw ‘unlicensed’ holding music into the mix and the gravity of this infringement is obvious.

The PRS is looking to get an injunction against the force and if it’s successful it will silence music in police stations right across the county, unless they dig deep for the appropriate license. The PRS is also sensitively and sensibly claiming damages from the already under-funded police.

It seems that further police forces in the UK have informed the PRS that music is often played in the background in their offices, with eleven of them either failing or refusing to obtain licenses enabling them to listen to it legally.

Generally, the PRS make a request for information from people who they believe should be paying them money, usually by letter. The recipient is then expected to tell them all about their music-playing antics and after this is complete, the PRS calculate and then send out a bill. Interestingly, it’s claimed that the head of legal services at Lancashire police told the PRS that she had instructed her colleagues to ignore the requests for information. She then emailed the PRS and said she had instructions to accept the service of proceedings against the force.

The PRS legal eagles believe that Steve Finnigan is admitting the claims, which could mean that the UK will shortly have its first Pirate Chief Constable. Let’s hope his associates at Cleveland Police don’t get involved - the last thing the police boss needs is to be arrested on conspiracy to defraud the music industry.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Police Chief Faces High Court Anti-Piracy Action

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Police Chief Faces High Court Anti-Piracy Action torrent downloads.