The Majority of Pirated P2P Content Uploaded By 100 People?

[HardOCP News]

I'm not calling B.S. on this new piracy study but are they seriously trying to say that only 100 people are responsible for the bulk of the content on pirate sites?

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.

 

[HardOCP News]

That just doesn't seem possible, does it? Maybe they meant "100 people at any given time."

 

[Rofl-Mic-Lofl]

I always see video and game releases from the same core 3 groups spanning several sites. I believe it.

 

[-Sn1PeR-]

Yep, a few specific scene groups do the majority of the good quality movies. They get brand recognition and gain quite the following.

 

[dr.stevil]

seems about right. Most content that's uploaded (apps, games and movies) comes from a limited number of scene groups which is then re-uploaded over and over again.

 

[jeremyshaw]

That just doesn't seem possible, does it? Maybe they meant "100 people at any given time."

At 85k posts, you have quite the grip on news posting (not compariing to piracy, but maybe these people view it as a hobby/living?

 

[Methadras]

That just doesn't seem possible, does it? Maybe they meant "100 people at any given time."

That's a lot of bandwidth to use for uploading.

 

[Seraphical]

But there is more money in suing your average Joe then finding 100 people to cripple a P2P network...

 

[Zerikin Loukbel]

Sounds about right really. The first seeders for stuff is probably a rather small group.

 

[TGA]

I was going to say something but it’s been almost 18 years for me and I am sure things have changed much as I have.

So I will just say I am sure like everything else release groups are larger than ever. So if it’s just 100 people making the content available initially then it’s only 100 people cause that’s all that are needed to do that job.

 

[c0mad0r]

I was going to say something but it’s been almost 18 years for me and I am sure things have changed much as I have.

So I will just say I am sure like everything else release groups are larger than ever. So if it’s just 100 people making the content available initially then it’s only 100 people cause that’s all that are needed to do that job.

I think the "100 people" they are referring to most likely represents 100 guilds/alliances/clubs/groups of hackers/seeders.

Like many others, I too was once an iiRC botter who ran his own iiRC channel and ratioed FTP server. But that has all changed for the likes of torrented material and it would be 99.99% impossible for this company to extrapolate that only 100 people are responsible for so much content...

There's far more than 100 seeders out there with no life who submit content to torrent sites!

 

[Semantics]

Sure i'll believe this, only need a couple seeders for popular items to dl for a few days then the thing will just be self sustaining.

 

[Jonelo]

The study is more interesting than that.

Anti-piracy agencies in the dirty war to saturate the p2p with fake files, and malicious users (those who spread virus or malware ) are responsible for 30% of the content and 25% of downloads.

And about the 100 users ...
half are altruistic and the other half are anti-piracy agencies, distributors of malicious programs or websites that get financial compensation from advertising.

Sorry for my bad english , but the study is made in my country by "Carlos III " university

http://blogs.elpais.com/trending-to...a-la-guerra-sucia-contra-el-p2p.html#comments

 

[tubular]

Steve may not want to call BS, but I will

 

[Denki]

"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."

If I'm reading this right it says around 100 users is responsible for 66% of uploads and 75% of downloads.

Based on that alone I'm going to go ahead and say that this study is factually incorrect. There's no way 100 users are responsible for 75% of all downloads, not when I can go onto the Pirate Bay and see some of the top torrents have thousands of leechers.

 

[Ruckus]

Core alone has more than 500 uploaders and they release only about 25% of the stuff out there, so yeah i call BS

 

[scaarbelly]

This study is misleading at best. They do not identify if they are talking about Spanish language content or all content. I agree that there are very few original uploaders that try to built a brand. But that field becomes even smaller when staying within the Spanish market.

@ Jonelo - Creo que tiene mas de la misma mierda que el gobierno queiere estafar mas dinero del publico como ellos hagan con los canones.

"Entiendo que la Ley también afecta al p2p. Pueden pedir a Telefónica por ejemplo que cape los puertos del p2p o que se bloquee la entrada a The Pirate Bay"

Thee above states that lawyers could try to have Telefonica (95% of the Spanish broadband market) block all p2p traffic. It is just a ploy to get more money out of legit consumers.

 

[dr.stevil]

If I'm reading this right it says around 100 users is responsible for 66% of uploads and 75% of downloads.

Based on that alone I'm going to go ahead and say that this study is factually incorrect. There's no way 100 users are responsible for 75% of all downloads, not when I can go onto the Pirate Bay and see some of the top torrents have thousands of leechers.

No? Go check out who the people are that originally uploaded those torrents. The study isn't talking about people who re-seed content after it's been uploaded... they're talking about who initially released it on the internet/scene.

there are only a small handful of scene groups releasing 'linux ISOs'

 

[LordCalin]

actually responsable for the content? maybe... there isn't many groups left that arn't just stealing cred from other people's work, or slamming each other claiming bad crack or improper rip... dosn't matter which part of the scene you look at movies, music, or apps.

if it was groups, i'd say way less then 100... people, I could see it being 100... but then once those 100 are done there initial upload it's all over and it goes up into the 10000's very quickly.

 

[Zepher]

"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."

If I'm reading this right it says around 100 users is responsible for 66% of uploads and 75% of downloads.

Based on that alone I'm going to go ahead and say that this study is factually incorrect. There's no way 100 users are responsible for 75% of all downloads, not when I can go onto the Pirate Bay and see some of the top torrents have thousands of leechers.

They are responsible for getting those files onto the net initially.

 

[Roliath]

it doesn't even matter, if its 100 or 1000, take one or all of them away and more will take their place.

 

[weebling1]

from the article: "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) "

How long has MiniNova been down??? I think this shows the ralative lack of understanding of what they were examining. There's a crap load of junk(pron) submitted by people 'advertising' web sites, but feature movie rips tend to be from 'groups', and TV rips from multiple individuals. I suspect by lumping all downloads together they've scewed their results

 

[The Cobra]

Why don't they try to track these shitheads instead of the avg user who maybe grabs a few songs a month off of the pirate sites?

 

[SamuraiInBlack]

Why don't they try to track these shitheads instead of the avg user who maybe grabs a few songs a month off of the pirate sites?

Because that would make sense.

 

[dr.stevil]

Why don't they try to track these shitheads instead of the avg user who maybe grabs a few songs a month off of the pirate sites?

most of them live in areas with little to no IP enforcement. Besides that, like Roliath said, when one goes down, there is another group waiting to take it's place. It's something that really can't be enforced... or not easily

 

[mxjcmxjc]

Read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and you'll see why that number is completely plausible. Or if you want the major points just check out the wiki article.

 

[bacon]

They are responsible for getting those files onto the net initially.

Yup they have dumps various scene groups use and those files get auto uploaded to trackers. Not much need for more than 100 really.

 

[Ultima99]

Why don't they try to track these shitheads instead of the avg user who maybe grabs a few songs a month off of the pirate sites?

If only that was the way the world worked...

 

[Disposed]

Core alone has more than 500 uploaders and they release only about 25% of the stuff out there, so yeah i call BS

Who the hell is core? And what makes you think they are responsible for 25% of "stuff out there"?

Dunno where you heard that but i guarantee its wrong.

 

[Tau]

The thing that most people here seem to be missing, or not aware of since it seems alot of people posing have no idea how the pirate 'scene' works outside of torrenting...

Everything is automated... once a release group preps something and gives it the OK for release (maybe a dozen people worked on it, at most) it is then uploaded to a private FTP, now there are dozens of other FTP servers that connect and pull content from this primary site, then FTP crawlers grab it and auto up it to FTP sites.... So the people actually doing the inital distribution I would personally think would be smaller than 100.. But if you could all the lowlevel launch groups, and site specific groups maybe.

 

[Chimel]

How long has MiniNova been down?

My thoughts exactly. But for 55,000 torrents on MiniNova and TPB alone, there could well be 100 uploaders only, since the study also says that many of these top uploaders use torrentboxes or VPNs, which would show up as only a few IP addresses even if there were a thousand uploaders.

I haven't a clue how they linked the IPs to user names, though. Can they see IPs in TPB forums, and are uploaders stupid enough to brag about their uploads in the forums? I also have a hard time believing that the 100 top uploaders would use their own private IPs and always the same one. As far as I could read in previous articles, they are behind several walls of anonymization.

But to say that 100 users are responsible for 75% of the downloads shows a total failure in the procedure used. I assume they were just looking at the IPs that were seeding rather than downloading, or something. If they looked at the popular torrents of the time, there must have been hundreds of thousands doing most of the downloads. Or it's a failure in how the study was written.

 

[SilverSliver]

Why don't they try to track these shitheads instead of the avg user who maybe grabs a few songs a month off of the pirate sites?

If they shut down the pirates really responsible for putting the content out there, how would they make money suing thousands of idiots downloading stuff off of Kazaa? There whole business model only works if piracy continues. They have no interest in actually stopping it.

 

[pxc]

If they meant the first seeders are 100 people, sounds likely.

 

[dr.kevin]

scene groups release to ftp topsites.

couriers trade among topsites and trickle down to ftp dumpsites.

some couriers with fast broadband are generous and share the shit on bittorrent.
other little peons with access to lowly dumpsites also share on bittorrent.

these couriers and peons make up the 100 people who initially seed the loot.

 

[StormUP]

Yup they have dumps various scene groups use and those files get auto uploaded to trackers. Not much need for more than 100 really.

Back in the day I know one major group used to have 6 dumps worldwide and only one in North America. These dumps fed into the top level IRC bots which then fed into a private IRC room for other members running public bots. From there, the largest of the public IRC channels provided by those users getting the material from the private rooms typically had no less than 4000 people on the channel at once. From there it spread, usually within a week of it appearing on the dump, to the p2p or other distribution methods of the time (prior to bittorrent).

All content distributed by the group at some point went through one of the 6 people running each of those dumps. The group runs basically like a cell and nobody really knows who anybody else is in real life. so if one dump were to get caught nobody would be able to rat out the rest of the group. At the top levels it is quite organized and people are very careful about having IP's and such on the dumps that are not associated with their real identities via billing or any other method.

I would assume things operate in a similar manner today, with newer technologies at the endpoint such as bittorrent.

 

[StormUP]

scene groups release to ftp topsites.

couriers trade among topsites and trickle down to ftp dumpsites.

some couriers with fast broadband are generous and share the shit on bittorrent.
other little peons with access to lowly dumpsites also share on bittorrent.

these couriers and peons make up the 100 people who initially seed the loot.

This. By 6 dumps in my prior post I basically mean topsites.

Couriers do all the work for the mere privilege of acces, the people running the topsite really don't do anything other than provide bandwidth/storage space.

 

[Deleted member 222586]

Guys, you should read the study before jumping on conclusions.

I have taken some parts of it:

These portals (referred to torrent sites, such as TPB) also offer an RSS feed to announce a newly published file. The RSS feed provides some information such as content category, content size and publisher’s username for a new file.
Identifying Initial Publisher: The objective of our measurement study is to determine the identity of the initial publishers of a large number of torrents and to assess the popularity of each published file (i.e. the number and identity of peers who download the file).
Toward this end, we leverage the RSS feed to detect the availability of a new file on major BitTorrent portals and retrieve the publisher’s username. In order to obtain the publisher’s IP address, we immediately download the .torrent file and connect to the associated tracker. This implies that we often contact the tracker shortly after the birth of the associated swarm when the number of participating peers is likely to be small and the initial publisher (i.e. seeder) is one of them. We retrieve the IP address of all participating peers as well as the current number of seeders in the swarm. If there is only one seeder in the swarm and the number of participating peers is not too large (i.e. < 20), we obtain the bitfield of available pieces at individual peers to identify the seeder. Otherwise, reliably identifying the initial seeder is difficult because there are more than one seeder or the number of participating peers is large. Furthermore, we cannot directly contact the initial seeder that is behind a NAT box and thus we are unable to identify the initial publisher’s IP address in such cases. Using this technique we were able to reliably identify the publisher’s username for all the torrents and the publisher’s IP address in at least 40% of the torrents.

Once we identify a publisher, we periodically query the tracker in order to obtain the IP addresses of the participants in the associated swarm and always solicit the maximum number of IP addresses (i.e. 200). Our investigations revealed two interesting scenarios for which we could not identify the initial publisher’s IP address: (i) swarms that have a large number of peers shortly after they are added to the portal. We discovered that these swarms have already been published in other portals. (ii) swarms for which the tracker did not report any seeder for a while or did not report a seeder at all. To avoid being blacklisted by the tracker, we issue our queries at the maximum rate that is allowed by the tracker (i.e. 1 query every 10 to 15 minutes depending on the tracker load). Given this constraint, we query the tracker from several geographically-distributed machines so that the aggregated information by all these machines provides an adequately high resolution view of participating peers and their evolution over time. We
continue to monitor a target swarm until we receive 10 consecutive empty replies from the tracker. We use the MaxMind Database [3] to map all the IP addresses (for both publishers and downloaders) to their corresponding ISPs and geographical locations.

I think its clear they didn't check for old torrents, but for the last-to-enter ones, in order to study their distribution. IMO its kinda interesting to see a study focused on that direction.

5. INCENTIVES OFMAJOR PUBLISHERS
In this section, we examine the incentive of different groups of publishers in more detail.
(...)
Second, another group of major publishers allocate significant amount of resources to publish non-fake an often copyrighted content. We believe that the behavior of these users is not altruistic. More specifically, our hypothesis is that these publishers leverage major Bit-Torrent portals as a venue to freely attract downloading users to their web sites. To verify this hypothesis, we conduct an investigation to gather the following information about each one of the top (i.e. top-100 non-fake) publishers:
• Promoting URL: the URL that downloaders of a
published content may encounter,
• Publisher’s Username: any publicly available information
about the username that a major publisher
uses in the Pirate Bay portal, and
• Business Profile: offered services (and choices) at
the promoting URL.

Also interesting to see that few people distribute most of the content AND gain revenue while doing it. Its funny that people downloading content are giving money to those who pirate content, although probably without knowing it

 

[BloodDonor]

Seems to me, for DVD?Blue Ray type copies of movies, at least before theyre out in retail, its someone IN THE MOVIE/DVD industry doing it... your average job bloggs doesnt have access at the Discs

 

[dr.kevin]

Also interesting to see that few people distribute most of the content AND gain revenue while doing it. Its funny that people downloading content are giving money to those who pirate content, although probably without knowing it

these days, pirated content is abundant because of financial incentive.
It's not worth it for those of us who actually have good jobs.
But kids will work hard for a little allowance money.

I often laugh about it.

many storage websites (megaupload, hotfile, rapidshare, and more and more new websites popping up each day, etc etc) give commission for each download, hoping downloaders will buy a monthly subscription. These storage websites live off of piracy.

So all these kids are fighting for what little commission there is, rushing to get warez out as soon as they drop. 0-hour stuff. Some kids have established such a good reputation that thousands of people ONLY download from them.

it's a vicious cycle supported by pirated content.

 

[stiltner]

Because I cannot do research on this level, I am going to lean towards I can agree with this.

I remember way back in the day, when everything was a sneakernet, and we had local UG's that got together to exchange software on floppy. It was generally 2-3 people that supported a pool of 30-40 others.

That was back then. With the expansion thats taken place I can easily see this happening.

You have 1 inside member at most of the larger distribution houses, or even insiders at the company themselves, and that 1 person can supply everyone / everything. That 1 person sends it to his 1 friend, who pools it out to the rest of his group, and a small seed becomes a giant oak tree.

Its very possible. It doesn't seem so at first, but the more you examine it, very possible.