Princeton Professor Ed Felten over at the Freedom To Tinker blog explores a survey his students recently completed on BitTorrent file availability that found, not surprisingly, that a significant majority of the content available violates copyrights. Again, this is what's available, not necessarily what's being actively downloaded, the survey taking a random, 1021-file sample of files available via the trackerless variant of BitTorrent, using the Mainline DHT. Of that data, just ten of the files, or approximately 1% were likely to be non-infringing:Raise your hand if you're surprised? Of course the fact that a lot of pirated content is available via BitTorrent isn't surprising, and while some are using the study to support the view that clearly no good can come of BitTorrent, others are debating the study's methodology. Mike Masnick over at Techdirt however, thinks the study just shows how much better a job the entertainment industry could do at delivering what consumers want:Blocking BitTorrent simply drives those consumers to distribution platforms that are harder to track. Again, if the entertainment industry wants to compete with piracy, they need to offer cheap, easy, and elegant alternatives.