A study by the U.K.-based Internet research firm Envisonal reports that 23.76% of worldwide traffic on the net involves pirated content. In the U.S. the figure was lower with an estimated 17.53% of traffic involved in piracy. Video streaming accounts for between 27% and 30% of U.S. traffic, but only 1.52% of that is illegal.

 

The Innovation Policy Blog reports that the difficult to police BitTorrent traffic accounts for 18% of worldwide bandwidth use, with at least 11.4% of that figure devoted to copyright infringing activities. Of the 2.72 million torrents that Envisonal investigated, two-thirds were illegal. Of the10,000 most popular BitTorrent transactions, 35.2% were copyrighted films, 14.5% was TV shows, and nearly 7% was games. 

 

Right behind BitTorrent is the infringing use of cyberlockers (like Rapidshare and MegaUpload) account for 5.1% of worldwide traffic. According to Deadline, the MPAA just filed a legal action against the cyberlocker Hotfile.

 

Movies and TV shows aren’t the only copyrighted materials at risk from Internet piracy. Manga has definitely suffered from the availability of huge amounts of material for free, and several direct market retailers have told ICv2 that downloading of digital versions of American comics is increasingly common. The Anime News Network reports that police in Japan have arrested an 18 year-old student, who had posted over 3,800 volumes of manga to the Web and earned about $3,300 in ad revenue.