Update: Infringing files outnumber legitimate content 297 to 1 on torrent sites

Following yesterday's post, both Torrentfreak and MiniNova have sent us a reaction.

Ernesto, one of the editors of Torrentfreak, has a good point raising questions about the study’s sampling and methodology. The number of torrents that the researchers find, one million, seems odd as the biggest torrent portals host several million torrents. Furthermore, the researchers identify torrents with over a million seeders. As some of these torrents have been uploaded years ago, there is a good possibility that these no longer work.

Furthermore, he rightly points out that by looking only at the most popular torrents, the view may be skewed. Perhaps the fraction of legal files is larger, but they are less often shared. Concerning the census of infringing content, it had probably been better to rephrase the research question. If the researchers had wondered how many of the most popular torrents were infringing, the validity had not been contested that much. This research question would maybe be more informative as well, as it better reflects the use of the torrent sites.

The conclusion, Ernesto says, would have been more correct if phrased as ‘of the filed that are shared at any point in time, less than one percent is legal’.

The Princeton census also does not reflect the total number of torrents, but rather focuses on the more popular ones.

The figures about MiniNova that we quote, are derived from an Envisional report, that stated that the number of torrents hosted on MiniNova just after the ‘big cleanup’ had dropped from 1,3 million to fewer than 10.000. That is a drop of more than 99%. Niek van den Maas, one of MiniNova’s admins, approached us with slightly different data. He speaks of 5% pre-approved content as well as freeware and open source works. His estimate is that MiniNova hosted 80-90% infringing content before it was removed.