Was reading the news and subsequently the report by MUSO, which clocked 179,549,999,693 total visits to piracy sites globally. The United States came in first at 20,356,738,842 visits of piracy sites. The metric Piracy Demand Rank puts Israel and Singapore as two countries with high demands of piracy at more than 175 visits per user. Correct me if I am wrong, is visiting opensuse.org and downloading the ISO image via the torrent approach considered piracy already? I am abit puzzled. Is the 4.7 Gb direct link also considered as software piracy by such reports? PS: Before today I have never heard of MUSO.
As this is a questions and not News & Announcement, this will be moved to Looking for Something other then Support en is CLOSED for the moment.
Moved from News & Announcements and open again.
IMO
Based entirely on the “Methodology” and “Piracy Categories” sections of one of your links, their reports and data are largely a bunch of illogical ****.
Perhaps their “years” of identifying Domain Names of sites that promote or support Piracy (and they don’t provide any definition of that, assuming that there is a common definition) have some value.
Their metrics are all arbitrary (like assuming that a 30 minute connection is equivalent to an act of piracy), no detailed protocol analysis(only <maybe> a cursory observation) and no apparent description for identifying each type of pirated content are all very basic to evaluating the validity of their analysis, and IMO aren’t some kind of “Trade Secret” so should be easily open for inspection.
But,
Their website is pretty clear that they’re not targeting technocrats, their mission statement is clearly to provide anti-piracy services to big content providers, so they only need to publish stuff that is convincing enough for people to buy. And, I don’t know if true and accurate numbers are important to a content provider, it’s pretty well known and accepted that if your content is valuable and requires some kind of subscription or fee then it’s probably being pirated. Numbers to a content provider are probably just decorations.
So,
Just know that piracy defined as illegally obtaining content contrary to the content’s licensing policy is big stuff, but how big? I wouldn’t rely on MUSO statistics, but it’s very big but could be less than or more than the MUSO numbers which might not be even relatively close to any reality.
As for publicly licensed software like openSUSE, who knows whether it’s swept up in the MUSO numbers and counted incorrectly, and <especially> if for instance you found a torrent file to a publicly licensed software at a place like thepiratebay.org which almost certainly would have been counted incorrectly according to the MUSO documentation.
It has always ever been the case, **** data in means **** data out.
TSU
@tsu2
I completely agree with you.
A particular case to support your general observations.
A few years ago in a country wide “quality” daily newspaper here in the Netherlands there was an article about illegal downloading. The journalist mainly wrote what a representative of an organisation that tries to sue people/organisations that offer illegal content said.
That guy told the journalist that “every internet user that downloads using a torrent should know that that is always illegal”. As most journalist’s knowledge of IT does not reach any deeper then the knowing how to click and type on their MS Windows system, this lie went unchallenged and was duly published in the article.
I think the expression used here is “spreading FUD”.
I am not sure what your concerns are. When you are afraid that your legal behaviour ends in the statistics as illegal, that may surely be the case. But who cares. Most statistics are wrongly interpreted anyway.
When you are afraid that they will knock on your door because you downloaded openSUSE using a torrent, I do not think that will ever happen. 
On Thu, 04 May 2017 14:56:02 +0000, hcvv wrote:
> Correct me
>> if I am wrong, is visiting opensuse.org and ‘downloading the ISO image’
>> (https://software.opensuse.org/422/en) via the torrent approach
>> considered piracy already?
It’s not. The use of a torrent does not make it piracy if the software
maker permits it.
That’s the ultimate arbiter of what’s legal and what’s not - what the
rights holders allow according to their license.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
I’m mostly agreeing with what others have posted.
Those things are not piracy. But whether MUSO considers them piracy, I do not know. There are groups out there using scare tactics and trying to over-exaggerate the amount of piracy that there is.
On Thu, 04 May 2017 17:46:11 +0000, hcvv wrote:
> When you are afraid that they will knock on your door because you
> downloaded openSUSE using a torrent, I do not think that will ever
> happen.
Especially as they are not the rights holder for openSUSE; they have no
legal standing to go after an openSUSE user for using a torrent download
of the product.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Appreciate as well as concur with the above responses. Thank you.
Perhaps, put it in this way, I did not see a problem, which is why the problem that caused me to start the thread was because I did not see a problem yet the report is being highlighted as mainstream news here in Singapore. I was coming from a technical perspective too, as several of the good folks above have already suggested. The report was quite novice in a way, such as the manner in which it categorised approximately all forms of torrents as an act of piracy, while all digital downloads from direct and non-purchase sources as also acts of piracy. If we were still in the kazaalite or napster era I could understand if they classify file sharing as piracy because loads of the files being exchanged were copyrighted mp3s till proprietary binaries i.e. the file sharing applications were developed in a way that they would facilitate piracy.
Yet, today in the Internet of Things age, if somebody tells me about torrent, I take it that he or she is developing open source apps, i.e. it is either charitable or pro bono. Likewise, if anybody tells me about direct downloads, I take it that he or she is in campus with his own smartphone making video clips about what he ate as lunch till the latest SDKs or plugins that she is getting hosted on platforms like Github. In other words, it is not that there is no piracy, but the fact that there is no need of piracy in most developed countries unless one is in Myanmar or North Korea I will not know or understand. When I use openSUSE I no longer bother myself with piracy because there is no such thing in GNU GPL. Even when my users make me support Windows 10, very rarely do I hear of them needing me to crack a single app because even Adobe Photoshop Express is free while Autodesk AutoCAD has cloud based apps that are free too. In summary, I could not understand what that MUSO report was driving it and now that you all have replied, I probably can care less as hcw kindly pointed out.