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A scientific study has estimated that just 100
internet users are ultimately responsible for publishing most (almost 67%)
of all the "illegal" (unlawful) copyright content (music, tv
shows, movies, games and applications) on public P2P (BitTorrent)
file sharing networks. The primary motivation appears to be money and the study
identifies several broadband ISPs, including one UK provider (Virgin Media), as unwittingly playing a
big part.
The study, which set out to examine the behaviour of the
users who are responsible for publishing over 55,000 files on the two main
portals (Mininova and The Pirate Bay), was carried out by Spain's
Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M). The content they posted ultimately accounted for
"75 percent of [all] the downloads" (i.e. by end-users).
In reality this study is actually quite old and has been
available to the public since the middle of 2010, although the University has
only now decided to publicise it. The study itself breaks the users down into
three main groups: fake publishers, altruistic top publishers and
profit-driven publishers. The primary two are defined as follows.
Sources of Alleged Copyright Files
on P2P Networks
Group 1: 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.
Group 2: 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.
For the past two or three years it's sometimes appeared
as if Rights Holders have been waging a holy war against consumers.
The new study suggests that their efforts might in fact be better targeted
towards tackling the REAL source publishers of such content. By making money
out of it these publishers are doing something that is truly illegal and
not merely unlawful (civil offence).
Study Quote:
"On the one hand, antipiracy
agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to
protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the other hand,
content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial
incentives. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to
publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their
associated traffic will be significantly reduced."
Professors Rubén Cuevas, co-author
of the study, said:
"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."
The study also sought to determine the broadband ISPs
that hosts each major publisher and use that information to assess the type
of service (and available resources) that a publisher is likely to have. The
analysis found that the top 100 users were split between several world ISPs,
including the cable operator Virgin Media
UK (sorry for the small text below, that's just how it's presented).
The mn08 (Mininova 2008 - 20.8K Torrents), pb09
(Pirate Bay 2009 - 23.2K/10.4K Torrents) and pb10 (Pirate Bay 2010 -
38.4K/14.6K Torrents) references merely represent the different dated data
sources that the study used. For example, mn08 shows that 2.42% of sample
Mininova torrents came from a small number of prolific users on Virgin Media's
network.
As a result of all this the best solution might actually
be for advertising networks to pay more attention to which websites their
banners are showing on and remove those that profit from such activity. However
this could easily run the risk of being applied too aggressively. Imagine if
Google couldn't advertise on its own YouTube service because of Rights Holder
complaints.
Another proposed solution by the
report might be to go after the worst link sharing sites with expensive fines,
although this is also a legally difficult angle of attack (a link isn't the
same as hosting the content itself) and could potentially catch perfectly
legitimate websites too.
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