Envisional Estimates Infringing Use – by “Wesley W”

Piracy Report 2011

NBC Universal commissioned Envisional, a business specializing in protecting other businesses from fraud and piracy, to analyze bandwidth usage on the Internet. Their goal was to determine what percentage of that usage infringed upon copyright. The report was released in January 2011. The report studied global internet usage and internet usage in the United States.

Blame it on the P2P

The report estimated that p2p traffic accounted for most of the copyright infringement on the Internet traffic. Specifically Bittorrent is estimated to account for 18% of all Internet traffic and of that traffic 63.7% was infringing material. This suggests that 11.4% of the global Internet traffic was non-pornographic copyright infringement conducted through bittorrent.

The bittorrent traffic was followed by cyberlockers such as MegaUpload and RapidShare. The infringing content of cyberlockers were estimated to account for 5.1% of all internet traffic. Other forms of P2P file sharing like Gnutella, eDonkey and Usenet were estimated to contain mostly infringing content. 86.4% of the content was infringing and non-pornographic and totalled 5.8% of global Internet traffic. Video streaming brought up the rear with a measly 5.3% of all video’s being infringing totaling 1.4% of global internet traffic. As you can probably tell from the charts above the numbers for Internet usage in the United States is about the same.

Of Porn and Piracy

For the most part, the report excludes data on pornographic content because they had difficulty discerning the copyright status of the content. When the top 10,000 torrent links were investigated and sorted by type the report found that 35.8% was porn, 35.2% were films and 12.7% were television shows. The remaining 16.3% was a combination of software, PC games, music, console games, anime, sports, books/audiobook and unknown content. This confirms that bittorrent P2P is mostly used for copyright infringment and porn videos.

Pirates anyone?

While the majority of content on p2p networks was found to be infringing it was interesting to note that music was no longer the most pirated material on the Internet. The numbers and chart above were for global Internet usage but the numbers for just the U.S. are pretty similar. The whole report can be read here.