Is content publishing in BitTorrent altruistic or profit-driven?

BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand, antipiracy agencies and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Rubén Cuevas Rumín, Michal Kryczka, Ángel Cuevas, Sebastian Kaune, Carmen Guerrero, Reza Rejaie
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2010, Content Publishers, P2P Content Delivery, Publishers