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100 P2P Users Upload 75% of Content
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers say that about 100 people (called pirates in the article) are
responsible for 75 percent of all downloading on BitTorrent (and the same group does 66 percent of all uploading), and says that the way to shut down the p2p network is simply to disincentive that relatively small number of people. The other large group identified in the study were people (such as from copyright enforcement agencies) who uploaded fake content to frustrate other users. No suggestions were made about how to prevent people from uploading fake content — but it was suggested that the first group could have their ad revenue cut or could be heavily fined."
I don’t really get (and the article didn’t really seem to explain) how these elite uploaders of the pirated content receive this ad-revenue. Are they saying that the people who post the bulk of the infringing torrents on various networks receive ad-revenue from the indexing sites (where the ads would be displayed)? I don’t understand how ad revenue flows from the indexing sites to the users who upload the content.
It almost seems like these guys asked themselves “why do they do it”, looked at a torrent site, saw the ads, and just said “ah, that’s why” and wrote a paper.
Also, the suggestion in this article to provide “disincentives” to the people uploading the bulk of pirated content is kind of obvious and silly. If the media industry had any way of actually doing this, it would have been done a long time ago. I think it’s already recognized by most people that the bulk of pirated content originates from a small number of sources. I can’t imagine that big media hasn’t been trying unsuccessfully to shut this group down for quite a while.
Unless I’m missing something, this whole article comes across as another one of these ridiculous studies where after 3 years of research and a few million dollars they reveal that fire is hot and scissors can be sharp. I file this right next to
And now you have part of the real MO behind the doj's mandatory data retention treason. Toss all these dicks out in 2012
Headline says uploading, summary and linked article say downloading. Headline is wrong.
Why don't they just pay off the 100 to get them to stop?
I'd be willing to bet that there is a 'core' of people on tpb and others that represent a bulk of the trusted content. I, like many others, tend to download off of tpb from the 'trusted' uploaders most of the time. Coincidentally, those also tend to the the torrents with the most seeders and leechers. When you factor in the fact that many of the big torrent sites mirror to the same torrents, this really doesn't sound too far fetched. Again, I think the 100 number is a little low, though...
Researchers say that about 100 people (called pirates in the article) are responsible for 75 percent of all downloading on BitTorrent (and the same group does 66 percent of all uploading),
So if they upload about 66% of the content then why does the headline say that they upload 75%?
I think at this point we should feel lucky that slashdot didn't take the "66%" and "75%" and resize our browser window.
Don't they realize that artists are being disincentivized from creating content? That means only the safest, accountant-friendly products get made (e.g. crappy romantic comedies and bubblegum pop). I'm a big movie buff and it's infuriating that Hollywood is getting so creatively conservative.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
.es
These people don't really seem to understand the P2P hierarchy. Content gets pirated by groups, who release it to top sites, which sell slots to people and have affiliations to closed torrent trackers. The users of those trackers then leak the stuff to the public p2p networks. So yes, there may be a closed group doing the actual leaking, however, that does not mean the content does not exist and that no-one will take their place once they are gone. It's utterly ridiculous to think you will stop pirating by attacking the lowest part of the food chain.
"In our opinion," the authors of the study conclude, "the success of BitTorrent lies in the availability of popular content which is typically protected by copyright law, and people who take the risk of publishing that content do it because they receive an economic benefit. If in the future these users lose 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 this content, which would make people stop using the application on a massive scale."
These people have no clue how torrents and seeding works. When someone completes a torrent, they can choose to then seed that download. There is no economic incentive there whatsoever. The seeder gets absolutely nothing out of seeding. All it takes is one person to make an initial seed, and then if each downloader joins in seeding that content, then the number of seeds grows exponentially. Anyone can create a torrent, and anyone can seed. These guys make it sound like there is some sort of main repository from which all other downloaders get their torrents.
If you have such a small number of people posting content, and they are making money (meaning they have accounts which identify them), then they would be easily tracked and prosecuted. How can this really be true?
That said, most people "pass along" content rather than rip it themselves. Is it really possible to tell the difference between a user that passes along content they acquire from some other source using bittorrent vs a user that actually rips content and passes that content along?
If the contributors are also the heaviest users (downloading 75 percent of the content) then it is really unlikely that they are ripping that content in the first place. How would they have the time, and why would they download what they ripped themselves? So if we assume that these "100 users" on these two sites actually contribute 66 percent of the content, and that most of that content isn't actually ripped by them, but acquired via other sources outside these sites, then does that that only 4 or 5 people are really ripping content?
Seriously, none of this makes a great deal of sense. It seems to me that the content flow comes from a much broader bases, and that the active users on these sites are not the same as the active users on other sites.
I see no "take these 100 out and problem solved" magic bullet here. But I'd have to see more details than this article gives to know for sure.
I'd just like to say, "thank you!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've been on a variety of trackers in the past and I can assure you that 100 users are not responsible for anywhere near 75% of the content available. But even on crappy public trackers like piratebay it can't be that bad.
it may be closer to reality to say that 5% of peers are responsible for 90% of the traffic however. There are always small clusters of high speed seedboxes running on any good tracker.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ignoring all the contradictions from the article, look up any popular movie on any bittorrent site and there's tens of thousands of people downloading it. Are they saying it's the same 100 guys downloading the same file over and over?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The fact that they were only analyzing Mininova and The Pirate Bay explains the erroneous nature of their results. Those websites don't represent the entirety of BitTorrent - in fact, the real copyright-infringing pirates try to remain unaffiliated with torrent sites entirely, and private trackers represent the majority in terms of data transferrence these days in regards to BitTorrent. These "researchers" obviously know practically nothing about how the torrent tracker heirarchy works. Their article is just a nice source to cite to my friends when they ask me why they shouldn't use TPB or Mininova to download that new Kanye West album.
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.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone with even a shred of IT knowledge knows that there are a lot of downloaders, far more than the quoted 100, even if that number is limited to 75% of available content. Hell, a quick search of TPB will show single torrents with more peers than 100.
Now, if they meant uploads, then that's slightly more believable, if they're counting each major release group as one "person". But that's a pretty bad typo to make in a paper about IT, enough that it makes me doubt the credibility of anything else in the paper.
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- E. Debs
Yes you do.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The worst offender is named Linus Trovalds. He uploads huge files on a regular basis and tens if not hundreds of thousands of people download them. Clearly he is the biggest pirate of them all and must be stopped from distributing other peoples copyrighted works.
Most of the major uploaders are actually groups of people. They have people responsible for getting content, for ripping content, for packaging and for uploading it. If any of these researchers had a clue what they were talking about they'd have realized that each one of these accounts is backed by at least 25+ people. Even if they did get the person doing the actual upload (which I doubt because that's what they specialize in) the reset of the group would just move on and find someone else to do the upload.
I wish them the best of luck in their effort of killing ants with a hammer. Meanwhile, there are about a zillion other methods in use, and another ten zillion being thought up. Be careful not to ruin your nice marble furniture while hammering at the ants.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No way it is technically feasible simply on terms of manpower.
I have, especially in the past, been a big torrent user. Their have been times in my life that I have consumed as much media as humanly possible and downloaded twice as much as I could consume (all on a 5MB line), and btw spending a significant amount of time simply finding torrents. Their is no way that anyone, no matter how much bandwidth they have, could torrent more then twice what I did (and that is not even really realistic unless their sole concern was using up as much bandwidth as possible).
Their is no way that 75% of all torrent traffic was just 100 times what I was doing (just looking at the torrent sites and all the torrents that I am not involved in that have tons of seeds and leachers).
I assume that they must of mixed up corporations and ISPs with single users.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is just an excuse to target a reasonably sized group and make examples of them to the much larger and harder to 'hit at once' group. This is one of those situations where they are just going to target the small group of people because they can, but in the end, it will only lead to them having to target the 'next' small group of people that miraculously fill their void when they realize "Oh snap! File sharing is still happening at exactly the same level without these 100 people in the mix!". It's people who got paid to head-hunt, trying to show that the money they received was worth it so they continue to get paid to 'head-hunt' in the future. Rediculous, it's like Napster days all over again, it's all fun and games until Grandma is arrested for an Elvis mp3.
So, a small number of stable and fast seed boxes are used by many uploaders?
Truly, this is news...
So 100 people are getting 75% of the Internet's love from the downloaders. Researchers suggest that if we "disincentiveize" these people, we'll stop 75% of the downloads.
This is bonkers.
Sure, you could smother those 100 people with RIAA-issued pillows, but then the Internet would go to the next best 100 people providing content. Because this is a perfect marketplace, people can move to the best content. Get rid of the best content providers, and you might slightly diminish content quality, but consumer behavior would be the same: download the best available option. There'd be a new group of 100 people that get the download love, and we'd have to get more pillows..
I doubt they are talking about those 100 literally uploading the most number of bytes. They upload quite a bit I'm sure. But I think they mean 100 people are creating the torrents which are making up the vast majority of torrent usage. 100 seems a little low based on my limited experience, but I would easily believe that less than 1000 people are at the core of "creating" the illegal content that shows up at the top of the charts on torrent sites.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Hmm so a mere 100 people are responsible for most that is uploaded to BT sites.... their names?
ub3rh4x0r ...
Al De Boner
PirateBob
Huge Jackman
Have these people never seen the movie Sparticus?
The idea that 100 people are responsible for even 10% of all content on P2P networks is laughable. Let's just consider torrents.
The Pirate Bay alone claims that it currently hosts 3,655,124 torrents. 75% of this is ~2.7 million, but lets say that means the 100 have uploaded 2 million torrents.
So in 10 years (bittorrent is less than a decade old), 100 users have uploaded 2 million torrents. That works out as 2000 torrents per user per year. That means each of these 100 people uploaded on average about 5.5 torrents every day.
5.5 torrents uploaded each day, every day for 10 years. That's what it would take to meet these researchers claims.
Assuming that these uploaders are the ultimate source of the illicit data, and that each torrent costs on average, say $10 (assumming they are largely movies and torrents), then each of these users is spending ~$55 a day on content meant for ripping and uploading. That's ~$20,000 a year, and that's before we even consider the time and resources put into ripping and uploading.
The numbers don't add up. Argue 1000 users and it still works out at $2000 a year and 4 torrents a week, both of which numbers I regard as still being too high. 10,000 users would seem far more feasible.
May the Maths Be with you!
WTF? Either there's very little downloading being done or those 100 people are very busy watching all those films and listening to all that music they download...
No I don't. And it certainly wouldn't be a measly million dollars, which is less than what one can expect to make in a lifetime, even if I did. For what, to ruin 30 of his "friends" (or people he knows) lives? Words can't hardly describe what I feel about that idea.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Here it is: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11-Cuevas.pdf
The only way you can "take down" the peer to peer file sharing "network" is by forcibly removing p2p file sharing software from every person. Why are their still efforts like this and who are the jerks who pursue these "solutions"?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I feared it was only me ...
At the absolute top were 127.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.1 ?
There is a bit of a resemblance in the layout. It's one of the first things I noticed when I saw the new design.
Here's a Facebook screenshot for comparison:
http://different-kitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/DK_FacebookPage_Screenshot.jpg
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The "study" may be BS. But it does raise the issue of how to disagree with the law, disobey it, without being punished for it. You are essentially risking punishment for ignoring the law. It may be a small issue, it may be a stupid law, but if someone picks you out for punishment, you could be set up, screwed, and ruined big-time. Cheating on taxes, drinking a beer in the wrong place/time, smoking a joint, downloading copyrighted things, running a red light, all of these things could set you up as a target for someone who wants to make an example out of you or whatever. For example I refused to comply with a local law requiring me to check ID for every user that used a computer at the cybercafe. (No, not in the US). I just couldn't agree. However, eventually a user abused the law, and now I'm answering in their place in a defamation case, perhaps being forced to pay thousands in damages - alleging I allowed the defamation by not following the law. They too felt abused by their boss apparently, and went to a cybercafe to send some emails accusing the boss of corruption and a dozen four-letter word things. Well, it's a big crime here. Not checking the ID is nothing, but now I'm caught as a target in bigger issues.
So disagreeing with the law is legal, scoffing at the law may result in nothing much of the time, but it's actually perhaps best to consider better ways to protest the law, while checking your options in case you are required to show your compliance with the laws.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm used to exercising caution with other browsers as well. But, as parent says, Lazarus is one of the greatest addons I've tried.
You can password protect your databases and customize storage in several ways. There's a chrome extension as well, that works slightly different (relating input to each form)
http://lazarus.interclue.com/
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I think one of the 100 was named AXXO....
all pirating we to come to a complete stop... for CDs, DVDs, or Blu Rays?
1. Realistically speaking how much is the price inflated to make up for all this theft...
2. How much would we see the price come down? or would we?
Although the summary is bad, this seems like a known phenomenon. I'm pretty sure they mean that 66% of the content by number of .torrent files, or 75% by GB downloaded is first-seeded by about 100 people. Honestly, the number is probably closer to 1000, but it's still a relatively small number.
Now, I don't know how movies or music go, but as far is pirating games, there is a relatively small number of people or cells that are responsible for obtaining, cracking, and first-seeding the games.
Disincentivize with extreme prejudice. Presumably by overwatering the flowerbed by the basement windows.
If the content creators, particularly tv shows, would setup official subscription torrent rss feeds and trackers, they could cash in on it instead of spending so much money fighting the 21st century...
Well that makes sense, but that is not how I read the /. article at all.
And it has to be remembered that most of these people posting lots of high ranking torrents are groups of people and not individuals.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Long live demonoid...my main man!! if u were a gurl i'd kiss ya
No I don't. And it certainly wouldn't be a measly million dollars,
By admitting that your price is higher than a million dollars, you're pointing out that it exists.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
Is it CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco, or the Slashdotter behind door number 3?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm in Brazil, there are a ton of Internet laws being discussed on state and federal laws, some very confusing and completely contradictory. The only laws that ever passed, however, require cyber cafes to keep complete records of all clients for five years. Based on that law, several civil lawsuits have been launched against the cafe if it doesn't have data on the client sought, making it responsible for the original offender's actions, and requesting damages going into tens of thousands.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
75% of torrents are fake, visit-our-website-and-click-our-ads-for-the-password nonsense or malware. I can believe that around 100 accounts are responsible for the majority of this stuff. They may also fake-seed each other to raise the profile of their garbage files. I do not, on the other hand, believe the vast majority of legit torrents are posted by a small number of people. I mean legit as really in what they claim to be, not as in legal.
No, I don't acknowledge it exits. For one, it doesn't. For two, I was pointing out that it is disgusting to me that someone would do that for such a low figure. But then what many people do disgusts me. IF there were a figure, it would be closer to the billions range. But then again, I don't want a billion dollars, so then I don't have a price, now do I?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
75% of the uploaders are behind one of 100 proxies
Pick any torrent proxy... I'm guessing they simply gathered IP addresses and failed to examine where they originated from. People are stupid if they aren't behind a torrent proxy, with all of the lawsuit-happy organizations out there like the RIAA. It also avoids getting a DMCA notice just because you were downloading an album that got scratched up when little Johnny decided to play fetch with Fido using your CD collection.
Funny how BTGuard seems to be one of the top uploaders! That guy is some kind of pirate!
If it's only 100 people for the vast majority of all "piracy" -- out of billions that use the Internet, doesn't this say that "piracy" is insignificant? Doesn't this say they should ignore it as not worth pursuing?
This has me wondering: since there is lots of "fake" content out there, isn't it now somewhat defensible that when you tried to download avatar.avi you were looking for one of the fake ones, and not the real one?
We've been after that Anonymous Coward guy for years.
Have gnu, will travel.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute their client and patches. Does Blizzard count as a person?
Anyone have any stats on how often Linux ISOs are downloaded via BitTorrent?
100 is such an oddly round number. A combination of IP blocking software and a badly configured uTorrent client, maybe?
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
These guys have no f'ing clue what they are talking about. If it's true, then I probably know all 100 people.
or else!
I would suggest they have actually found that a small group are responsible for a lot of seeding, not the initial upload (initial seed). Thus they have either (a) no fucking idea how this works and I'm right or (b) some really, really smart tracing software and I'm wrong.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
...that's exactly the way p2p it's supposed to work. For those who still don't have a clue, the big uploaders are mostly from "The Scene" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
They get the leaks, rip, transcode, and post files for others to share.