Pirate Bay releases map of Pirates

Pirate Bay the King of BitTorrent piracy websites has recently released a Google powered map that charts the locations of Pirates around the world. Which is based on the origin of the tracker that a person uses when downloading items from Pirate Bay states Torrent Freak.

At the time of writing this post I wanted to see how many Papua New Guinean users were downloading items from Pirate Bay. I was amazed to find out that their was 14 users per minute at 9:50pm tonight (9th Feb 2009) downloading items from Pirate Bay, or 0.001% of Pirate Bay users at this time were from Papua New Guinea. I pebble in the ocean. When you compare the figures of people who live in Papua New Guinea with other countries.

The interesting thing to notes was that the country where the most users came from was China which you would expect it to be. With 33% of Pirate Bay users coming from China, around 7 million users. The interesting part about it is that Pirate Bay is banned in China. So I guess where there is a will there is a way.

The statistics is now based on unique users connected per minute! Keep in mind that a torrent client usually only connects to the tracker once every 15-20 minutes. Total unique users per minute : 1343613 (at the time of writing this post)

95% of music downloaded online is illegal

The BBC says that the International Federation of the Phonograhic Industry (IFPI) states that 95% of all music downloaded online is illegal. According to the IFPI it is the biggest challenge because many artists and record companies miss out on payments because of the illegal downloading of music. Steady growth of online music sales has lead to a 25% increase since last year, which accounts for a fifth of all recorded music sales. But the falling CD sales has not being made up by the increase in online music sales.

IFPI stated that there were 1.4 billion single tracks legally downloaded in 2008. The online music industry is now estimated to be worht $US 3.7billion per year.

I did the calculations on it worked out that the music industry is missing out on an estimated $US 70.3 billion per year due to illegal downloads or about K207 billion per year worldwide.

Promotion of artist by Frostwire P2P client

You hear a lot of bad publicity about P2P software like FrostWire, Limewire, etc, helping to increase piracy. FrostWire is now being used as a great tool to help promote undiscovered singers/bands. FrostWire is doing this through their new client welcome screen, which offers users the option to download tracks for undiscovered singers.bands. Currently FrostWire is offering tracks from Ray Styles for download via BitTorrent. FrostWire also allows the streaming of the version, which means that the music can be sampled without even using the torroent. May be even undiscovered Papua New Guinean singers/bands my be able to promote their music via FrostWire one day.

10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008

The 10 most Pirated Movies of 2008 according to Torrentfreak are:

1. The Dark Knight - 7,030,000 downloads
   
2. The Incredible Hulk - 5,840,000 downloads
   
3. The Bank Job - 5,410,000 downloads
   
4. You Don't Mess With The Zohan - 5,280,000 downloads
   
5. National Treasure: Book of Secrets - 5,280,000 downloads
   
6. Juno - 5,190,000 downloads
   
7. Tropic Thunder - 4,900,000 downloads
   
8. I Am Legend - 4,870,000 downloads
   
9. Forgetting Sarah Marshall - 4,400,000 downloads
   
10. Horton Hears a Who! - 4,360,000 downloads

It would be interesting to find out of the amount of Pirated Movies that were downloaded in Papua New Guinean.

The 10 most Pirate TV Shows on BitTorrent

According to TorrentFreak television "shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent". Last week the 10 most Pirate TV Shows were:

1. Heroes
2. Prison Break
3. Dexter
4. House
5. Desperate Housewives
6. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
7. Fringe
8. Top Gear
9. Stargate Atlantis
10. The Simpsons

Currently with the limited amount of broadband users with in Papua New Guinea and the cost of having an internet connection is preventing large scale pirating of TV shows in PNG. But as the network infrastructure improves and bandwidth and internet cost go down. Piracy in Papua New Guinea is going to be a bigger problem then it already is. Major local music companies like CHM may be fighting an up hill battle when the internet technology in Papua New Guinea improves.

The cheek of the Pirates in PNG

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to work out that movies that are just being released on the big screen in the United States and are already on DVD in Papua New Guinea are pirated copies. A friend of mine recently purchased a few DVD's from a DVD shop that use to be located at RH Hyper mart here in Port Moresby. The quality of the DVD's was fine for the amount of money that they spent on the DVD's. The problem they had with the DVD's was that the people who Pirate the DVD's put a crypted trailer etc on the end of the movie to prevent the owners of the DVDs from burning copies. The cheek of the people who pirate these DVD's in PNG. They steal these movies in the first place then modifiy it in such a way as to prevent the people that they sell these movies to, from making copies or transferring the movies that they purchased to iPod's, etc.