Exaggerated student file sharing stats
p2pnet news | P2P:- American students and, by implication, students in other parts of the world, are “devastating” the multi-billion-dollar Big 4 record labels, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, they say, with Hollywood close behind.
But are their file sharing acitivites as horrific as the entertainment cartels claim them to be?
University of Pennsylvania senior information security specialist David Taylor (right) wonders about that on his Information Security and Privacy blog.
In March, 2007, “The hammer is coming, US congressman Ric Keller has warned colleges and universities, telling them to ‘get serious’ about p2p music and movie downloads (he calls it ‘theft’) on campuses,” p2pnet posted, going on:
Chairman of the US House Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, he’s ably supported by Hollywood enthusiasts Howard Berman and John Conyers who’ve joined in on the increasingly discredited entertainment cartel bid to sue students into becoming submissive consumers.
But before the stick comes the carrot, which would be paid for by US taxpayers on behalf of the movie and music mega-companies.
“The Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007 (H.R. 1689) would expand the allowable use of funds by the Department of Education to include technology solutions to piracy,” says internetnews.com, going on:
“Keller’s proposal comes as academia is taking increased fire over its efforts to curb the piracy that Congress and the music industry claims is rampant. Despite years of lawsuits targeting campus pirates, more than half of all college students still download music and movies illegally, according to the University of Richmond’s Intellectual Property Institute.”
According to the millionaire lawyer Cary Sherman, president of the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), US schools, with universities up front, are responsible for staggering cartel losses.
Sherman calls RIAA’s attacks on the Big 4’s own customers “tough love“.
But are the so-called losses in reality as huge as the industry makes him out to be? – wonders Taylor, who’s fast becoming a thorn in the side of the entertainment cartels.
And equally interestingly, in Taylor’s spotlight is corporate remora MediaDefender.
If his name seems familiar, it’s because he blew the whistle on the MPAA’s illegal use of open source software to build a Hollywood application designed to snare university file sharers.
Now, emphasising he’s “absolutely against” the “illegal sharing of files,” he says he just wants to, “make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers,” but, “I have a feeling they aren’t fair at all.
He goes on >>>
I’m sure we all remember when emails were leaked from a company called MediaDefender. The news Spread fast and a lot of people started looking to see what MediaDefender was up to. MediaDefender claims to be an anti-piracy solution that stops the trade of illegally traded copyrighted material. A site called Mediadefender-defenders received a copy of the leaked emails and published them online for the whole world to see. In those emails a few threads show that one of their customers wants to see what number of EDU (Education) addresses are showing up in the Gnutella network. MediaDefender generates some reports from the data they have and provides a few updates to their customer.
The data contained in the section below can be found by using the following Google search:
site:mediadefender-defenders.com “edu ips” intitle:edu
When you see numbers published in the media about the huge number of college students sharing illegal files and then take a look at the numbers below there just seems to be a huge gap. I realize some of the EDU IP addresses may be from a private NAT (Network Address Translation) which enables multiple hosts on a private network to access the Internet using a single public IP address. It is safe to say the numbers are probably a bit higher than the data shows but I wouldn’t imagine it would be significantly higher. I don’t have access to data that would show this, however.
In the data below the first column is the Date at which the numbers were gathered by MediaDefender. The second one (Uniq IPs) shows the count of unique IP addresses they saw on the Gnutella network. The third column (Uniq EDU IPs) shows the number of unique addresses that resolved to an EDU domain. The fourth column (% EDU IPs (MediaDefender) are the percentages of EDU IP addresses that were on the Gnutella network. The fifth column (Actual % EDU IPs) are the numbers I came up with from their data.
To make a long story short, MediaDefender’s data shows that the average percentage of EDU IP addresses found to be on the Gnutella network during the time they sampled the data is 1.76%. That number alone seems to be fairly low.
Now we have at least some numbers here. One thing to think about, however, is the numbers above do not necessarily reflect the number of people sharing files illegally.
This just shows the numbers MediaDefender saw on the Gnutella network. I believe the most popular application for this network would be LimeWire.
I was doing a bit of research on Limewire a few months back and was trying to find a file to download that was at least 4 MB in size. Of course I don’t want to download anything that would be considered illegal so I kept searching and searching and searching. Well, after several hours I just could not find any content over 4 MB that I could feel comfortable to download and gave up due to lack of time I had to spend on it.
So I guess I can raise my right eyebrow and give a “what are you doing on that network” look.
Well, I was there researching so maybe others are as well.
There are other networks out there as well such as BitTorrent, Ares, FastTrack and many more. Some networks are used by various software vendors for pushing out a lot of legitimate content such as Open Source applications and operating systems as well as software patches.
Another article from Alternet says “But sticking with the MPAA’s semi-bogus numbers, educational technology nonprofit Educause points out that “since less than 20 percent of college students live on campus and use the residence hall networks, this means that less than 4 percent of the infringers are using campus networks, and they are responsible for less than 9 percent of the losses. Over 91 percent of the claimed losses are on commercial networks.” Get that: 4 out of every 100 infringers (even trusting the industry assessment of infringement, which usually is not too carefully defined) are on college networks”
Educause has a handy list of issues, links, and an action page here.
I don’t have the technical skills nor the resources to really dive in and get actual numbers. If I did you can bet I would be diving into it with full force.
If there are some of you out there that would like to start thinking of creating a project to find out what the real numbers of Student P2P users are it would be really valuable for the EDU community!
Definitely stay tuned.
Also See:
Information Security and Privacy – Is illegal file sharing on college campuses really as high as they say it is?, December 8, 2007
p2pnet – Cartels boost attack on US schools, March 30, 2007
tough love – RIAA lawsuits are ‘tough love’, October 18, 2007
MPAA’s illegal use – Hollywood’s MPAA — copyright violator, December 4, 2007
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