Investigating the reaction of BitTorrent content publishers to antipiracy actions

Abstract

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.

The ecosystem for accessing TV series and films in Spain: An outline of the situation following the Intellectual property act 2015

“…A similar trend was observed when Megaupload was taken down (Farahbakhsh et al, 2013). In addition, the number of visits to sites that provided embedded video increased to 35%.…”

Film Factory Losses: is BitTorrent a Major Responsible?

“…Their study shown that, because of these close down events, revenues of three major motion picture company increased by 6.5-8.5%. Apart from that, the study [2] identified how antipiracy actions effect on online piracy by considering closure of Megaupload and the implementation of the French antipiracy law (Hadopi). They have shown that Megaupload closure diminished the activities of professional BitTorrent publishers who are running their own BitTorrent portals.…”

“…and audio files over the Internet. Previous studies have shown that a large portion of content available in these portals were videos [1] and unauthorized [2]. The main after-effects of sharing media files via these portals is that the community can stream or download without any charge or at a minimal cost.…”

A Look at the Consequences of Internet Censorship Through an ISP Lens

“…Previous literature has tackled the problem of how different network-level events, particularly in the context of anti-piracy laws, can affect the behavior of users [1] and content providers [22]. In the context of Internet censorship, studies have assessed the (sometimes unintended) impact of Internet censorship on global Internet services.…”