Characterizing dissemination of illegal copies of content through BitTorrent networks
Adler Hoff Schmidt · Americanae (AECID Library) · 2013
BitTorrent (BT) networks are nowadays the most employed method of Peerto- Peer (P2P) le sharing in the Internet. Recent monitoring reports reveal that content copies being shared are mostly illegal and movies are the most popular media type. Research e orts carried out to understand the dynamics of content production and sharing in BT networks have been unable to provide precise information regarding the dissemination of illegal copies. In this work we perform an extensive experimental study in order to characterize the behavior of producers, publishers, providers and consumers of copyright-infringing les. This study is based on seven months of traces obtained by monitoring swarms sharing movies via one of the most popular BT public communities. Traces were obtained with an extension of a BitTorrent \\universe" observation architecture, which allowed the collection of a database with information about more than 55,000 torrents, 1,000 trackers and 1.9 million IPs. Our analysis not only shows that a small group of active users is responsible for the majority of disseminated illegal copies, as it unravels existing relationships among these actors and characterizes consuming patterns respected by users interested in this particular set of contents.