Month: September 2015

BitTorrent Traffic Share Drops to New Low

download-keyboardOver the years we have been following various reports on Internet traffic changes, specifically in relation to BitTorrent.

Five years ago file-sharing dominated Internet traffic across the globe, but this pattern has slowly started to reverse.

Online entertainment services such as YouTube and Netflix have already taken away a large chunk of BitTorrent’s “market share” in North America and the trend is carrying over to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

The latest report from network management company Sandvine reveals that torrent traffic is now responsible for ‘only’ 8.44% of all Internet traffic in Europe during peak hours, compared to 17.99% two years ago.

Top 10 Peak Period Applications (Europe, Fixed Access)

sandeur

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s less torrent traffic, as overall bandwidth use may have doubled in the same period as well. However, other online entertainment services are gaining ground during peak hours.

With 21% YouTube currently accounts for most traffic and Netflix is also on the rise, even though it’s only available in a few countries. In the UK and Ireland Netflix is already good for 10% of peak downstream traffic.

The same pattern is observed in the Asia-Pacific region although BitTorrent still tops all other services there.

Top 10 Peak Period Applications (Asia-Pacific, Fixed Access)

sandas

At a quarter of all downstream traffic during peak hours, BitTorrent’s traffic share is down a few percentage points compared to last year. YouTube is currently in second place there with little over 20% of the total traffic share.

Since the recent dip in BitTorrent’s traffic share is relatively limited, it’s hard to tell whether the absolute bandwidth transferred by file-sharers has also declined in this region.

Finally, it’s worth noting that file-sharers worldwide may be more likely to use a VPN. This would lower the traffic share as well, underestimating the BitTorrent traffic numbers.

Time will tell whether the downward trends will continue in the months to come, and how the global differences in BitTorrent usage will develop.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

MPA Reveals 500+ Instances of Pirate Site Blocking in Europe

mpaOver the past several years Hollywood and its counterparts in the worldwide music industry have made huge strides in their efforts to complicate user access to so-called ‘pirate’ sites.

The theory is that if consumers find sites like The Pirate Bay more difficult to find, then the chances of those people buying official content will increase.

The first unlicensed site (AllofMP3) was ordered blocked in Denmark in 2006, and ever since rightsholders have been thirsty for more.

For almost a decade and with increasing frequency since 2010, site-blocking has been in the news, mainly centered around actions against torrent sites. In most cases of rightsholders testing the judicial waters around Europe, The Pirate Bay has been used as the guinea pig. History tells us that once The Pirate Bay gets blocked, the floodgates are well and truly open.

Although we’ve reported on every site-blocking court battle around Europe (including some that have been held behind closed doors), there are no publicly available central resources that provide an accurate overview of how many sites are blocked in each country. It doesn’t help that in UK, for example, rightsholders add sites to existing court orders without any fresh announcement.

Yesterday, however, the MPAA’s international variant, MPA Europe, provided some interesting numbers which highlight the extent of site-blocking on copyright grounds on the continent. The presentation, made by Deputy General Counsel Okke Visser at the iCLIC Conference in Southampton, UK, included the slide below.

site-blocking-eu

What the image shows is a total of 504 instances of web-blocking across Europe. It’s worth noting that some of the instances are duplicates, since sites like Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents are blocked in multiple regions. Also, it appears that proxies aren’t included in the total.

Italy

The region with by far the greatest number of blockades is Italy, down in the south of Europe with 238 instances. The country’s AGCOM agency has been ordering sites to be blocked at an alarming rate, with no trials needed for a blackout.

However, things haven’t necessarily been going to plan. Research carried out in Italy found that blocking only increased blocked websites’ popularity, via the so-called “Streisand Effect”.

United Kingdom

It’s no surprise that the UK takes second place with 135 instances of blocking. Today they’re being ordered on behalf of Hollywood, the music industry, book publishers, sports broadcasters and even watch manufacturers.

The very first site to be blocked in the country on copyright grounds was defunct Usenet indexer Newzbin/2. The official process began in 2010 when MPA Europe, citing legal action in Denmark, asked local ISP BT to block the site. Subsequent court action resulted in an injunction and the floodgates were open for dozens of additional demands.

Denmark

After being the site-blocking pioneer of Europe, Denmark now has 41 instances of site-blocking according to the MPAA. Earlier this year a large batch of torrent and streaming sites were blocked, followed by a second wave in August.

Spain

When new legislation came into effect in Spain in January, site-blocking was bound to follow.

Sure enough, in March 2015 local ISPs were given 72 hours to block The Pirate Bay and in April a block of a popular music site followed. According to MPA Europe, Spain now has 24 instances of blocking.

The rest

While blocking measures are in place across the whole of the far west of Europe, thus far plenty of countries are holding their ground. In the north, Sweden is currently block-free, but that could all change depending on the outcome of pending legal action.

After putting up a tremendous fight against the odds, the Netherlands also has no blocks in place. However, a case against local ISPs still has some way to run.

Slightly to the east, Germany has no blocks and to date there has been little discussion on the topic in Poland or Romania. However, neighbor Austria now has six instances of blocking after the movie industry won a protracted legal battle against The Pirate Bay and other sites.

Instances of copyright-related site-blocking across Europe

#1 – Italy (238)
#2 – United Kingdom (135)
#3 – Denmark (41)
#4 – Spain (24)
#5 – France (18) (ref)
#6 – Portugal (15) (ref 1,2)
#7 – Belgium (13) (ref 1,2)
#8 – Norway (7) (ref)
#9 – Austria (6)
#10 – Ireland (2) (ref 1,2)
#10 – Greece (2) (ref)
#10 – Iceland (2) (ref)
#11 – Finland (1) (ref)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

ISPs Agree to Block The Pirate Bay in Iceland

icelandflagAs the arch-rival of many copyright groups, The Pirate Bay has become one of the most censored websites on the Internet in recent years.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site and the list continues to expand.

This week Icelandic ISPs reached an agreement with local entertainment industry representatives to prevent subscribers from accessing the notorious torrent site.

In addition to The Pirate Bay, the Internet providers also promised to block Deildu.net, Iceland’s most popular private torrent tracker.

The agreement follows a court decision from last fall when the Reykjavík District Court handed down an injunction to ISPs Vodafone and Hringdu, forcing them to block the two sites.

Iceland’s local equivalent of the RIAA (STEF) wasn’t satisfied with the limited scope of the order and wanted other providers to follow suit. The group set an ultimatum threatening legal action last year, but the parties eventually decided to settle the matter out of court.

The decision to block access to The Pirate Bay does not come without protest. The local Pirate Party, which is the most popular party with a third of all ‘votes’ in recent polls, describes it as censorship.

“We are of course against this, especially because of the circumstances,” Ásta Helgadóttir, Member of Parliament for the Icelandic Pirate Party, informs TF.

The Pirate Party views a private censorship agreement between ISPs and copyright holders as a worrying development, and warns that the judicial system should not be bypassed.

“The blocking itself is currently nothing other than an inconvenience which is quite easy to circumvent with some googling or setting up a VPN. What’s more serious is the way the rightsholders could bypass the judicial authority to get their censorship measures through with the ISPs,” Ásta tells TF.

Instead of asking for pointless DNS blockades copyright holders should focus on negotiating better contracts with the artists they are supposed to represent.

“The real problem is the poor negotiation status of the individual artist when it comes to signing contracts. That is the real problem, not private sharing of culture,” Ásta says.

According to local reports the Internet providers have agreed to block The Pirate Bay’s main domain names and any new ones that subsequently arise. However, for now, many of the well known proxy sites are still available.

Recent history has shown that people who want to access blocked sites can always find a way. Circumvention tools such as TOR, VPN services or the specialized Piratebrowser are readily available and growing in popularity as blocking efforts expand.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

Hadopi Reports on Five Years of “Three Strikes” Piracy Measures

In the latter years of the previous decade a new idea for dealing with piracy was gathering momentum. Known as “three strikes” or “graduated response”, the system was based on the understanding that pirates could be persuaded to change their ways – if they believed they were being watched.

After years of planning, in the fall of 2010 France became one of the pioneers of the warning system. Its introduction was controversial. Since the initial rules dictated that persistent offenders (and potentially innocent account holders) should be kicked off the Internet, fears persisted that thousands of families could be denied Internet access.

This week marks the five year anniversary of the French program and the event has been commemorated by the overseeing Hadopi agency with the release of statistics relating to the past 60 months of anti-piracy activities.

Since September 2010, more than 5,400,000 initial warning notices have been sent to French Internet account holders. In the same period 504,000 individuals received a second notice, which indicates that less than 10% of first time offenders managed to get caught twice.

Perhaps most impressive at first view is the number of account holders receiving a third notice. According to Hadopi just 2,900 received a final ‘strike’, that’s just 0.57% of those who failed to heed the second warning.

But despite the potential for massive disconnections, that was never to be. After disconnecting its first ‘pirate’ for two weeks back in June 2013, the following month the government outlawed the measure in favor of a system of fines.

In the months and years that followed 2,336 “third strike” investigations took place, with just 400 of reportedly the most serious cases being referred for prosecution.

Hadopi detailed the outcome of some of those cases this week. They include a persistent film pirate who was fined 300 euros and a uTorrent user who admitted distributing pre-release content (300 euros). An account holder who failed to appear at a hearing to discuss both music (a Rihanna track) and movie piracy (Despicable Me 2) picked up two fines of 500 euros each.

In theory fines under Hadopi can reach 1,500 euros but it appears that no case has been considered serious enough to impose the full amount.

So, given the apparent tiny numbers of repeat offenders, is France on its way to solving the piracy riddle? That’s very difficult to say but what we do know is that the figures cited above aren’t the full story.

Back in July the agency revealed that it had received more than 37 million complaints but had only managed to process a fraction of them. This means that it’s possible that many first, second and third time offenders have actually been ‘caught’ by anti-piracy monitoring companies but the notices have not been sent through the system.

Hadopi estimates that it currently processes around 50% of all reports, around 50,000 notifications every day. This means that around 100,000 notices are sent by rightsholders but 50,000 potential first, second and third strikes are thrown away.

Hadopi says its target is to process every notice it receives but whether that will be achieved next year or in another five years time will remain to be seen.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak