A Glimpse At Piracy In the UK and Beyond 132
Zocalo writes "The BBC has a fascinating look into the music download habits of the UK population based on stats compiled by Musicmetric. The stats, gathered through the monitoring of BitTorrent swarms and geo-locating the IPs, shows the hotspots for music copyright infringement across the UK and regional preferences for certain types of music. Some of the outliers are somewhat unusual though, suggesting some problems with the methodology or sample size, unless people on the Isle of Wight really do prefer trumpet-playing crooner Louis Armstrong to the likes of Rihanna and Ed Sheeran who top the lists nationwide. Not in the UK? There are some global stats on the ' Most pirated near you? tab' of the story. Better yet, if you want to crunch the numbers for yourself all of the data has been made available at the Musicmatch website under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license and a RESTful API to access the data (free for non-commercial use, but requiring an API token) is also available."
Where's China and Russia? (Score:5, Interesting)
For those too lazy to look. Here's the Top 20 "pirate" countries.
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Italy
4. Canada
5. Brazil
6. Australia
7. Spain
8. India
9. France
10. Philippines
11. Mexico
12. Netherlands
13. Portugal
14. Poland
15. Greece
16. Hungary
17. Chile
18. Romania
19. Sweden
20. Belgium
Interesting is the absence of China and Russia, countries not known for having authoritarian copy laws. Maybe the Chinese and Russians are happier exchanging thumb drives and DVDRs. I would be very worried, if I were Hu and Putin, of all that info that can't be censored or monitored with a few key strokes.
While the presence of India at #8 isn't surprising, given its huge population, somewhat surprising is the presence of smaller Third World countries like Brazil and Philiippines that you don't expect to have the broadband speed necessary for a decent BT download.