100 P2P Users Upload 75% of Content 269
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."
Contradiction (Score:5, Informative)
100 accounts!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Little Confused (Score:4, Informative)
Or you could use the great Lazarus Firefox extension.
It changed my life. (kinda)
Patently Absurd--Run the numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Little Confused (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the actual this press release describes ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327v2 [arxiv.org] ), it explains that the "Top Publishers" usually try to promote the URLs of their own websites. This can be done by adding the URL to the filenames in the torrents (such as HarryPotter-slashdot.org.avi ) or in the metadata on the portal. The publisher makes profit from ads or subscriptions to the site they own, not from ads on the indexing sites.
The 100 p2p users basically refers to 100 unique IPs that were responsible for creating and initially seeding the torrents; they aren't necessarily related to the people who actually first provide the content.
They acknowledge that some of the publishers were altruistic people who published legitimate files without trying to promote other sites, but these individuals were less prolific than the ones promoting other sites or distributing fake content.
Re: Lazarus Form Recovery of awesomeness (Score:3, Informative)
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/ [interclue.com]