If you ever wondered which U.S. Universities were the most torrent-happy, you’re in luck. TorrentFreak (with the help of ScanEye) has produced a list of the top 50 institutions for BitTorrent use.

And New Jersey’s Rutgers University takes to top spot.

Rounding out the top 10: NYU, University of Houston, USC, Texas A&M, George Washington, University of Minnesota, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Maryland, and Tennessee State.

According to the study, the most downloaded files at Rutgers were Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (game), and the album The Dreamer, The Believer (Common).

Check out the top 25:

Of course BitTorrent use doesn’t necessarily equate to unauthorized file sharing. But TorrentFreak confirms that it’s that kind of use that’s the most popular.

If you don’t see your current college of alma mater on the list, that probably means one of two things – either your school is not very torrent-happy, or they’re just really good at hiding their tracks. Evidence of the latter? Another recent study said that Gainesville, Florida was the piracy capital of the United States. Absent from this list? The University of Florida, which is located in Gainesville.

According to the Global Record Music forecast, streaming revenues will increase 40% this year. Download revenues are only set to increase by 8.5%. Basically, Spotify and Pandora are currently about five-times as profitable as iTunes and Google Play (percentage-wise, of course).

“Although downloads still account for nearly 80 per cent of online music revenues, this market is maturing and spending is flattening in all key territories. Streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora will be the key growth drivers over the next five years as usage and spending grow rapidly,” says Strategy Analytics’ Ed Barton.

Streaming is going to crush downloads over the next few years, but when you team them up they still fall short of packaged sales. Overall digital sales are set to increase 17.8% to $8.6 billion, but still only hold a global share of 39%.

But Strategy Analytics predicts that will all change in 2015, when digital finally overtakes physical.

When streaming services were in their infancy, they just couldn’t compete with the likes of iTunes in terms of selection. It’s not that people feel they have to own their music, they just want to have access to everything they want to hear whenever they want to hear it. As services like Spotify are better able to provide that for $6-10 a month, people are naturally seeing the benefit in forgoing the $0.99 download.

[h/t The Verge]

The Pirate Bay has apparently been planning this change for a couple of years now, but the Magnet link technology wasn’t quite ready for prime time. As of today, Magnet links will be come the default format for downloading from the website, though users will still have access to .torrent links for some time yet.

Most users will not see a difference, however, since the majority of torrent software supports Magnet links already. BitTorrent and uTorrent, the two biggest torrent clients, have had Magnet link support for some time. The only difference most users will see is a longer start-up time before downloads start.

Concerns about bandwidth aside, part of The Pirate Bay’s motivation for this move has to come from the efforts that have been taken against them in the past. Repeated efforts to shut down or block the site have occurred all over the Western world. The fact that Magnet links are harder to block and require less bandwidth and hosting space will certainly make efforts to shut The Pirate Bay down more difficult.

[Source: The Pirate Bay]

Or, at least, they don’t stop their bit torrent search to take part in on-site surveys, which leads to one of the major problems when dealing with statistics from a survey, bias, of course. The fact that these surveys are normally voluntary-response based means that, although Pirate Bay got over 75,000 responses, PB visitors could easily overlook or ignore the survey prompt, which skews the findings.

But then again, considering the response rate was substantial, it could also mean that girls don’t pirate, and if they do, they don’t use Pirate Bay to do so.

The details about the Pirate Bay’s survey comes from TorrentFreak.com, and according to their article, Pirate Bay partnered with the Cybernorms research group, which bases its operations at the Lund University in Sweden. The goal survey, even with its built-in potential for bias, was to “conduct the largest survey among file-sharers.” Apparently, the results won’t be available until November, but there has been some data released, and these findings are about what you’d expect.

Pirates (or file-sharers, depending on which side of the fence you sit) want movies and instead of ceasing these actions, they would rather find more anonymous ways of downloading. This, quite honestly, should not come as a surprise. Even the data about female downloaders, five percent, according to the responses, isn’t considered shocking, but then again, maybe females don’t want to answer questions about their file-sharing habits, either.

And therein lies the rub with voluntary response surveys. It’s more likely that there are less female pirates than there are males, but the nature of the survey also lends itself to the idea that maybe these same women are just more private about their activities, anonymous surveys or not.

Then again, it could be a case of the “men do it like this, women do it like this,” with males downloading and females spending their time on Twitter and Facebook.

Another area of note is the idea that despite the incredible corporate backlash, file-sharers/pirates/downloaders/thieves/rebels–call them what you will–have no intention of slowing down. From TorrentFreak’s post:

According to the researchers it wont be easy to stop people from sharing files. Aside from seeking more ways to download torrents anonymously, the respondents are also increasingly seeking alternative sharing options, such as swapping USB-sticks and sharing files directly with friends via mobile phones.

Which means, at least in the United States where ISPs and entertainment content producers are close bedfellows, the legislative efforts of trying to turn the Internet into a cable TV package will continue unabated as well.

We’d be insulting today’s youth if we thought they couldn’t see through the thin veil draped over 50,000 "graphic novels" handed out to students warning about the dangers of sharing music online.

Though nobody you or I know has done any jail time for file sharing, or paid any fines to anybody but the RIAA in lawsuits, comic books distributed by the non-profit National Center for State Courts is warning kids they could face 2 years in jail and a $25,000 fine for state-level theft.

Much different than the narrative I discussed in this article, the narrative of one of the comics has a girl facing a loss of her scholarship because of file sharing. But, as Wired and other bloggers have pointed out, any charges brought against a file sharer would be brought at the federal level. The feds have been pretty reluctant thus far to go after downloading teenagers.

That’s the RIAA’s job, though don’t let the ominous string of initials fool you into thinking they (or the NCSC) is another enforcement branch of the government.

The NCSC was founded in the Eighties by Justice Warren Burger, and describes itself in its material as more than just a think tank, which is only slightly less vague than bigger than a bread box. Among their services, aside from interpreting the law for people, they offer research, educational, and publishing services, kind of like LawMedia.

Before you go thinking it a fair question to ask how much the RIAA "donated" to the NCSC for disseminating their creative interpretation and scary consequences propaganda material, it should be noted how difficult it is to find anything on Google by pairing terms like [RIAA] and [donations] or [charitable contributions] or [philanthropy].

The only things Google brought back —through page 3 of the results anyway, well beyond where anybody actually looks—were posts from people seeking donations so they could fight the RIAA in court, or reports about the "donations" the organization provides to politicians. (One post suggested they donate to the Hitler youth but, ho hum,  that appears to be satire.)

It’s probably only a coincidence politicians appoint a lot of judges, maybe even judges interpreting "justice" for the NCSC. And it’s very, very likely all those lawyers in the entertainment industry have no lawyer friends outside of the industry, in government or in connection with the NCSC, or otherwise. Probably. Most certainly. Just like the piracy battle has more to do with justice than with money. Right?
 

That may be because Trent Reznor and Radiohead were able to prove the concept that downloads are good for business.

"We want to be as free a players as possible," Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone. "We’ve been observing Radiohead and Trent Reznor and in twenty-seven years or however long it takes for the next record, we’ll be looking forward to everything in terms of possibilities with the Internet."

Fans were less than sympathetic when the band took a stand for art (and for art money) by suing Napster. Fans generally felt Metallica had enough money already and that their unrequited love for the band’s brand of metal shouldn’t be repaid by quashing their ability to share it with others.

The "we love you and want to share you and want to buy concert tickets and t-shirts" argument didn’t fly with the band at the turn of the century, but it only took a few years and a clear demonstration of profitability by Reznor and Radiohead, who both freed their most recent works online, to convince them.

Metallica isn’t alone in its fear of what the Internet means for intellectual property. While Elton John was suggesting the whole thing be shut down (we’re guessing via that giant wireless router as seen on South Park), photographers, artists, writers, and publishers have fretted about losing control of their work. Viacom sued YouTube, publishers sued Google, and the RIAA sued everybody else.

There’s not really an easy solution yet, but models are being created regularly to solidify and understand the value of free on the Internet. 
 

Only 11 percent of teens said they knew the laws "very well".  The majority (82%) of those who were familiar with the law said illegal downloaders should be punished. In contrast just over half (57%) who were unfamiliar with the laws said violators should be punished.

In general, teens view illegal downloading over the Internet as less serious than other forms of stealing. Less than half (48%) said punishment was appropriate for illegal downloading, but 90 percent said punishment was appropriate for stealing a bike.

Teens said their parents are their main source of information about what they can do online followed by TV, magazines, newspapers and Web sites.

Among teens who download content online, boys are more likely than girls to say they would not continue after being told the rules to download content over the Internet without paying for it or receiving the owner’s permission (76 % vs. 68% respectively).

"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager, Genuine Software Initiative for Microsoft.

"This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help
prepare their students to be good online citizens."
 

The chilling effect of the nonstop lawsuits and crackdowns on people for downloading movies and songs concerns University of Arkansas law professor Ned Snow. His recent abstract on the issue, called Copytraps, received mention on PhysOrg for what it has done to web users.

Those who download music, for example, and believe they are doing so legally, does not matter to the courts. Copyright infringement has occurred, and the accused has to pay.

The problem as Snow sees it comes from the broader impact of "copytraps," his word for sites that indicate downloading is legal. Anyone busted for dong this comes away with reluctance to do any other downloading.

That’s where Snow sees a problem. He contends in his analysis that considering the normal First Amendment protections for exercise of speech, penalizing downloaders is unconstitutional:

That certain forms of copy-speech receive First Amendment protection implies that copyright’s strict liability punishment is unconstitutional. It is well established that the First Amendment precludes strict punishment of unprotected speech, for a possible effect of strict punishment is chilling protected speech.

Speakers may refrain from engaging in protected speech for fear that they might mistake whether the speech actually is protected. The mere possibility of such chilling, courts have held, is sufficient to rule unconstitutional strict liability punishment of unprotected speech.

Snow’s essential argument seems to be that if people are prosecuted and penalized for downloading from a "copytrap," they are unlikely to engage in any legal downloading in the future. The effect of the punishment creates a violation of the First Amendment.

We will be interested to see someone try Snow’s opinion of prior restraint as a legal defense. "Strict liability punishment of copying makes no sense in a world where copying is the architecture of being," Snow said of the Internet.

Consumers Not Down With Video Downloading

Parks found that users usually download video from two sources, peer-to-peer networks (p2p) that have unauthorized copies of movies or licensed services like iTunes.

Users who download video from sites that are unlicensed have low levels of satisfaction because the quality and reliability of the video is usually low. The research found that consumers who only downloaded from licensed sites also were generally not happy with the experience.

"People don’t see a reason to use video downloading services," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates.

"Sure, it saves a trip to the video store, but it takes longer, looks worse, and you end up watching it on a 17" screen. No wonder consumers are dissatisfied with the experience."

He added that niche markets will emerge, but mainstream consumers attitudes towards downloading video will remain tepid.

The survey was first conducted in 2004 and revealed that 60 percent of participants had made illegal downloads. In 2006 the percentage fell to 43 percent and in 2007 it dropped to 36 percent.

The decrease in illegal downloading among the young can be attributed to parental involvement. When asked what concerns them most about downloading digital copyrighted works, such as software, music, movies or games, 62 percent said they had a fear of accidentally downloading a virus.

Fifty-two percent feared getting into legal trouble, while 51 percent said they were afraid of accidentally downloading spyware. Fear of getting into trouble with parents came in fourth with 48 percent.

"This study indicates that parents represent a growing and effective influence on the online practices of youth," said Diane Smiroldo, vice president of public affairs forBSA.

"But, while decreases in downloading are encouraging over recent years, youth are still taking too many risks online. We hope that parents continue to take seriously their role in
helping their children make the right choices online."