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 implications for user who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave 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 BitTorrent portals 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. On the other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic will significantly reduce.
During recent years, a few countries have put in place online antipiracy laws and there has been some major enforcement actions against violators. This raises the question that to what extent antipiracy actions have been effective in deterring online piracy? This is a challenging issue to explore because of the difficulty to capture user behavior, and to identify the subtle effect of various underlying (and potentially opposing) causes. In this paper, we tackle this question by examining the impact of two major antipiracy actions, the closure of Megaupload and the implementation of the French antipiracy law, on publishers in the largest BitTorrent portal who are major providers of copyrighted content online. We capture snapshots of BitTorrent publishers at proper times relative to the targeted antipiracy event and use the trends in the number and the level of activity of these publishers to assess their reaction to these events. Our investigation illustrates the importance of examining the impact of antipiracy events on different groups of publishers and provides valuable insights on the effect of selected major antipiracy actions on publishers' behavior.Piracy, law, Cyberlocker, Megaupload, P2P, BitTorrent, Hadopi.
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