Almost a
quarter of Internet traffic worldwide (23.8%) involved the distribution of
infringing content, and that isn't even counting pornography. That's the bad
news.
Over 17% of
U.S. Internet traffic is estimated to be infringing, with BitTorrent
responsible for more than half that total.
That is
according to a just-released study
from Envisional
and commissioned by NBCU, which has been a leading voice against online piracy
of intellectual property, including TV and film content.
The study was
released in advance of a Panel session Monday at the Innovation Technology and
Innovation Foundation (ITIF) in Washington.
Pornography was
not included not because there is not a large market in illegally distributed
porn online, but because its infringing status was "difficult to
discern."
The study found
that BitTorrent traffic, that new NBCU parent Comcast got smacked down by the
FCC for blocking, accounted for 17.9% of all Internet traffic worldwide, and
that almost two-thirds of that (63.7%) was illegally distributed content
including films, TV episodes, music, computer games and software.
The study
concluded that video streaming is the fastest growing area of the 'net and
accounts for more than a quarter of all traffic. Almost 95% of that is copyrighted
content streamed legitimately, but that still left 5.3% illegally distributed,
or 1.4% of all Internet traffic.
Envisional
calculated the percentages of infringing Internet traffic using 2009 data from
Sandvine, Cisco, Arbor Networks, and ipoque.
