RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven?
A1 Cuevas Rumín, Rubén
A1 Kryczka, Michal
A1 Cuevas Rumín, Ángel
A1 Kaune, Sebastian
A1 Guerrero López, María Carmen
A1 Rejaie, Reza
AB BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implicationsfor user who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishersbehave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrentportals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand, antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. Onthe other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentive. Therefore, ifthese companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at leasttheir associated traffic will significantly reduce.
PB Association for Computing Machinery
PB Drexel University
YR 2010
FD 2010-12
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/10116
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/10116
LA eng
NO 13 pages, 5 figures.-- ArXiv pre-print version available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327
NO Contributed to: The 6th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CoNEXT 2010, Philadelphia, PA, US, Nov 30th-Dec 3rd, 2010).
NO A talk on this paper was held at IMDEA Institute Madrid on Nov 23rd, 2010, http://bit.ly/f4epai
NO Comunidad de Madrid. S2009/TIC-1468/MEDIANET
DS e-Archivo
RD 27 jul. 2024