Pirates Identified

[softball]

the great success of a massively used application like BitTorrent depends on a few users.

A study done at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) identifies and characterizes the users who upload contents on the main P2P piracy networks on Internet and points out the incentives that they find to carrying out this activity.

The research study examines the behavior of the users who are responsible for publishing over 55,000 files on the two main portals (Mininova and The Pirate Bay) of BitTorrent, the most popular P2P application for file-sharing on Internet, where some users publish contents that are then exchanged with up to tens of thousands of internet users. Their growing popularity is mostly due to the availability of contents that are of great interest, such a recently released films in the cinemas, or episodes of a variety of television series.

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.