The Pirate Bay, an influential BitTorrent tracker and founder of a minor political party in Sweden, is in the fifth day of their trial for copyright infringement. During the proceedings, they claimed that 80% of the content hosted was not copyrighted, and that Youtube had a worse record. We check if this is true.
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The Pirate Bay, an influential BitTorrent tracker and founder of a minor political party in Sweden, is in the fifth day of their trial for copyright infringement. My views on copyright are outside the scope of this blog, but I did notice one bizarre quote from the trial:
When Altin asked about the amount of copyright material tracked by TPB, Peter explained that he carried out a survey of a random 1000 torrents from the tracker and 80% of the content linked by the site was not copyrighted, noting that there is much more illegal material on YouTube.
As someone rather familiar with the File Sharing Scene, this initially seemed a little far-fetched to me. But Torrents exhibit Pareto phenomena, where most visitors are concentrated to the most popular downloads. Perhaps a lot of legitimate content was hiding in the long tail.
To obtain a "random" sample of Pirate Bay Torrents, I looked at the 30 most recent torrents, provided here, and checked each one for copyright infringement(The Sample size is rather small, but I can't think of an automated way to check for copyright infringement). I then ran a similar procedure for Youtube.
Bar Graph of results, with red lines showing 95% confidence intervals
I found that about 70% of the torrents on Pirate Bay looked at likely violate US copyright laws, while roughly 30% of the content looked at on Youtube likely violate copyright law. The margin of error, given the sample size, is +/- 16% with 95% confidence.
However, a good deal of the illegal content on The Pirate Bay was very old and obscure(Think, 1960's era Hungarian Jazz), and most of the illegal content on Youtube involved videos that used copyrighted music as a background.
So it's possible that Peter's comment is true under Swedish copyright law, but it still seems doubtful that his website is more "clean" than Youtube.