Report: One-fourth of Web traffic is pirated content

By Jennifer Martinez 

Nearly a quarter of global Internet traffic consists of people downloading pirated content, with about half of that traffic derived from peer-to-peer file-sharing technology BitTorrent, according to a report funded by the entertainment industry released Monday.

The report said that 23.8 percent of worldwide Internet traffic involves copyrighted material that is illegally downloaded or uploaded, such as music, movies and TV shows. Half of that illegal content is downloaded on sites using BitTorrent, a free, open-source technology that facilitates trading of large content files, according to the report.

The research was commissioned by NBC Universal, which is now owned by Comcast, the cable giant that provides broadband Internet among other services.

The entertainment industry has called on lawmakers in Washington to get tougher on punishing those who infringe on copyrights. NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton has made several trips to Capitol Hill to express his concerns about the growing problem of online piracy.

The report was authored by David Price, head of piracy intelligence at Envisional, an Internet consulting firm in the United Kingdom that tracks online piracy and other fraud. At an event hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Price will release the results of the report examining how much bandwidth is used by illegal downloads.

The research showed that content downloaded illegally from sites utilizing BitTorrent technology makes up over 11 percent of global Internet traffic. Cyberlockers and video-streaming sites are responsible for around 5 percent and 1.4 percent of that traffic, respectively.

In the U.S., more than 17 percent of Web traffic consists of infringed content and roughly half of that traffic is attributable to sites using BitTorrent, the report found. Meanwhile, pirated works in cyberlockers — such as RapidShare and Megaupload — and video streaming sites make up around two percent and 1.5 percent of all Internet traffic in the U.S., respectively.

“There’s a lot of demand out there for free, pirated content,” Price said regarding the results of the report. “On the positive side, it tells you there’s an enormous demand for content on the Internet. There’s enormous opportunity for the legitimate means of content and it should go hand in hand [with the demand for content] to reduce illegitimate file-sharing.”

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent has been pegged as a generator of illegally copied music, movies and TV content that people can access and trade for free. Just last week, Google started blocking “torrent” from appearing in its search box’s autcomplete feature. It’s one of the search company’s new copyright policies that aims to prevent piracy-related terms from popping up in autocomplete so people have a harder time finding pirated content. San Francisco-based BitTorrent, which develops file-sharing tools and other technologies, said Google went too far and encouraged the search company “to reevaluate this decision expeditiously.”

Washington has also taken steps to crack down on copyright infringement. A joint campaign last fall by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security shut down the Web addresses of 82 sites that were said to offer counterfeit goods and pirated music and movie content. Near the end of the last Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a controversial bill that targets rogue websites.

The report said it excluded pornographic content, which typically comprises a large percentage of pirated works on the Internet, because it can be “difficult to discern” whether its copyright has been violated. However, Price noted that the percentage of global and U.S. Internet traffic that contains infringed content would be a lot higher if pornography was included.

NBC Universal said it asked Envisional to conduct the report so it could determine how big of a problem copyright infringement is and how much bandwidth pirated works soak up on the Internet. For the entertainment industry, today’s Envisional report provides more proof that online copyright infringement is a significant problem. In addition, it bolsters concerns of broadband providers about the misuse of Internet services to perpetrate illegal activity.

But similar research reports about online piracy have been deemed inaccurate and allegedly exaggerate the scope of the problem. A report released by online protection firm MarkMonitor in January found that Megavideo, Megaupload and RapidShare collectively received more than 21 billion visits annually. RapidShare immediately fired back against the report, picking at its methodology and arguing that it ignored the fact that “millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes.”

To find the percentage of Internet traffic that consists of infringed works using BitTorrent, Price tracked the top 10,000 swarms — or groups of people downloading the same piece of content — individually via PublicBitTorrent, which acts as a traffic cop that pairs a user with someone who has the particular file they want to download. Of all the material in the top 10,000 swarms, Envisional found that around 99.2 percent infringed upon copyright laws.

Price is confident in the report’s methodology and is ready to defend it, if necessary.

“We’re looking forward to debating the methodology. There are some people within the anti-piracy world [who] are not going to take issue with it, but they’re going to want to understand the methodology very carefully,” said Price, adding that “ticking apart reports is one of my great pleasures.”