Who Uploads the Majority of the Content to the P2P Piracy Networks?
Posted by Celia Walter | 28 Jan, 2011"A Research Study Identifies Who Uploads the Majority of the Content to the P2P Piracy Networks"
January 27, 2011 19:52 from Resourceblog
Note: The full fext research paper that's discussed below is available online (Free). You can find a link to it near the bottom of this post.
From a Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Announcement:
Users who publish contents on BitTorrent dedicate a large part of
their own resources (bandwidth, storage capacity) and assume the risks
involved in publishing contents that are protected by copyright laws.
So, is this altruistic behavior or is there some type of economic
incentive at work? "The success of BitTorrent is due to the fact that a
few users make a large number of contents available in exchange for
receiving economic benefits”, explain the authors of a study carried out
by the Telematic Engineering Department of the UC3M, Professors Rubén
Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero and Ángel Cuevas. Their analysis demonstrates
that a small group of users of these applications (around one hundred)
is responsible for 66 percent of the content that is published and 75
percent of the downloads. In other words: the great success of a
massively used application like BitTorrent depends on a few users.
The
study by the researchers at this public university in Madrid, in
collaboration with scientists at the IMDEA Networks Institute, the
University of Oregon (USA) and the Technical University of Darmstadt
(Germany), identifies who these users are and what their incentives for
massively publishing contents are. Basically, there are two different
profiles. In one group there are the so-called "fake publishers",
organizations fighting illegal downloading and malicious users who
publish a large quantity of false files in order to protect copyrights
and spread infected software, respectively. The other group includes a
small number of users (known as "top
publishers") who massively publish contents on BitTorrent and make
a profit off of this activity, basically from on-line advertising and,
to a lesser degree, from VIP subscriptions held by users who wish to
speed up the downloading of the contents. "If these users lose interest
in this activity or are eliminated from the system, BitTorrent’s traffic
will be drastically reduced", the authors of the study predict.
This announcement is based on a research paper presented at the ACM International Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies - CoNEXT, 2010 at Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA).
Title: Is
Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven?
Authors:
Rubén Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero and Ángel Cuevas, of UC3M, Michal
Kryzcka, of the IMDEA Networks Institute, Sebastian Kaune, from the
Technical University of de Darmstadt (Germany) and Reza Rejaie, from
the University of Oregon (EEUU).
Note: We're Linking to Version II of the paper. It was uploaded to arXiv.org on July 22, 2010.
(via arXiv.org and MS Academic Search)