Study: Most BitTorent files breach copyright

The University of Ballarat in Australia has published a research paper claiming that 89 percent of BitTorrent files it examined over a certain period infringed copyright, a result immediately hailed by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft as a victory in its war against file-sharing.

In the report, researchers from the university's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory analysed the most popular BitTorrent trackers on the Torrentz website on 21 April 2010 and scraped the information from them.

"In summary, our results indicate that 89 percent of all torrents from our sample are confirmed to be infringing copyright, both by the number of files and total number of current seeders," wrote the university in its paper. "Of the torrents in the top three categories — movies, music and TV shows — there were no legal torrents in the sample."

For more on this story, read 89% of torrents breach copyright: study on ZDNet Australia.