Envisional was commissioned by NBC Universal to analyse bandwidth usage across the internet with the specific aim of assessing how much of that usage infringed upon copyright.

Across all areas of the global internet, 23.76% of traffic was estimated to be infringing. This excludes all pornography, the infringing status of which can be difficult to discern.

The level of infringing traffic varied between internet venues and was highest in those areas of the internet commonly used for the distribution of pirated material.

BitTorrent traffic is estimated to account for 17.9% of all internet traffic. Nearly two-thirds of this traffic is estimated to be non-pornographic copyrighted content shared illegitimately such as films, television episodes, music, and computer games and software (63.7% of all BitTorrent traffic or 11.4% of all internet traffic).

Cyberlocker traffic – downloads from sites such as MegaUpload, Rapidshare, or HotFile – is estimated to be 7% of all internet traffic. 73.2% of non-pornographic cyberlocker site traffic is copyrighted content being downloaded illegitimately (5.1% of all internet traffic).

Video streaming traffic is the fastest growing area of the internet and is currently believed to account for more than one quarter of all internet traffic. Analysis estimates that while the vast majority of video streaming is legitimate, 5.3% is copyrighted content and streamed illegitimately - 1.4% of all internet traffic.

Other peer-to-peer networks and file sharing arenas were also estimated to contain a significant proportion of infringing content. An examination of eDonkey, Gnutella, Usenet and other similar venues for content distribution found that on average, 86.4% of content was infringing and non-pornographic, making up 5.8% of all internet traffic.

In the United States, 17.53% of Internet traffic was estimated to be infringing. This excludes all pornography. A breakdown of internet usage yields the following results:

- peer-to-peer networks were 20.0% of all internet traffic with BitTorrent responsible for 14.3%. The transfer of infringing content located on these networks comprised 13.8% of all internet traffic.

- video streaming made up between 27% and 30% of traffic, though only a small percentage of this was believed to be infringing (1.52%)

- Cyberlocker traffic was estimated at 3% of all network traffic and infringing use was estimated at 2.2% of all internet traffic.

Story filed 14.02.11