Trade organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) often focus on BitTorrent as a major source of distribution for pirated content. But what exactly makes up the content posted on BitTorrent, and who is posting it?
A new study by the Carlos III University of Madrid claims to have the answers to these questions, and the results may surprise you.
Researchers examined more than 55,000 torrents shared on Mininova and The Pirate Bay, both major BitTorrent portals, to identify the content publishers and track their file-sharing behavior.
“The distribution of the number of published content by each publisher is very skewed, i.e. a very small fraction of publishers (around 100) is responsible for a significant fraction of the published content (67%) and even more significant fraction of the downloads (75%),” the authors of the report claim. “These major publishers can be further divided into three groups based on their incentives as follows: fake publishers, altruistic top publishers and profit-driven publishers. “
Two of those three groups dominated the content examined and are defined by the researches as follows:
- Fake publishers are either antipiracy agencies or malicious users who are responsible for 30% of the content and 25% of the downloads. These publishers sustain a continuous poisoning-like index attack against BitTorrent portals that affects millions of downloaders.
- Profit-driven top publishers own fairly profitable web sites. They use major BitTorrent portals such as the Pirate Bay as a platform to advertise their web sites to millions of users. For this purpose they publish popular torrents where they attach the URL of their web sites in various manners. The publishers that pursue this approach are responsible for roughly 30% of the content and 40% of the downloads in BitTorrent.
The authors of the study suggest that targeting antipiracy efforts toward the relatively small group of profit-driven publishers would likely be quite effective.
“If these users lost their incentive, either because of a decrease in advertising income or due to having to pay very expensive fines, BitTorrent would very likely cease to offer these contents, which would make people stop using the application on a massive scale,” the authors of the study told PC Pro magazine reporters.
Removing that financial incentive may be more difficult than it sounds, however. Targeting and removing ads could get messy quickly, with issues of censorship and innocent companies getting caught up in what may turn into a sort of “witch hunt”. Finding the culprits and fining them would also prove difficult because many of the publishers post their content on rented servers and cannot easily be traced.
I think that the most valuable tidbit of information to come out of this study for the average consumer is that approximately one quarter of the files posted on BitTorrent are fake and may contain malware. If you’re downloading content from these portals, be vigilant about your system security.
