TorrentFreak, the world’s leading BitTorrent online news source, on Tuesday cried foul over the results of the study conducted by the University of Ballarat in Australia, saying that the report was “horribly wrong” and contains “mistake after mistake.”
In an article in its website, the editor in chief of TorrentFreak said Ballarat had made many mistakes during the preparation stages for the said report, stressing that the researchers and writers failed to gather the right information about the current situation of BitTorrents sites.
It will be recalled that Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) recently released a report claiming that some 89 percent of BitTorrent files were infringed or have violated several copyright laws.
ICSL mentioned in its report that Torrentz.com, one of the leading search engine of peer-to-peer (P2P) files on the Internet, contained about 90 percent copyrighted materials, which it claimed have been shared and downloaded illegally by the P2P file-sharers.
The report was also brought to the attention of the media by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, dubbing it as a “victory” in a war against illegal file-sharers in the online world.
However, TorrentFreak was quick to dismiss the claims, saying that the report’s conclusions were drawn by the anti-P2P organizations based on a “painfully inaccurate data and methodologies.”
Based in its own findings, TorrentFreak said that the ICSL failed to prove there were more than one million music, video, and document files that can be found online.
“In sites like isoHunt, users can find at least five million files,” the editor in chief said.
He also debunked Ballarat’s claims that BitTorrent has over 117 million seeds, saying that there were only 10 to 20 million estimated number of seeds in the P2P file-sharing websites.
Also, he said that there was no truth over claims that “The Incredible Hulk” reached more than 1.1 million seeds.
“Even the best seeded torrent in the world to today only has 13, 738 seeders,” he added.
TorrentFreak said that the report was only part of the continued harassment and demolition job by the anti-P2P advocates against BitTorrent websites.