How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit

That is one awful article. Arbitrarily cut in 4 pieces and never getting to the point. It is about a paper: <a href="http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11-Cuevas.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11...</a> [pdf] which from a first glance is not very good either.<p>Also the <i>traffic</i> is not what this is about but users uploading things.<p>Did anyone read the paper? Worth a second look or is it rubbish? "We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for 67% of the published content and 75% of the downloads." suggest the ladder. Not to mention that they talk about Bittorrent but actually mean The Pirate Bay.

Summary: "some people give away free (others') movies, and then put some links to their private adsense-laden portals in a README file or somesuch. This accounts for a very large percentage of the downloads from the pirate bay."<p>Very interesting findings, but it doesn't really answer the question of how important these people are to the pirate ecosystem. Are they just taking releases from more-private "underground" seeders and putting them on the pirate bay (in which case they are, effectively, just spammers and their elimination wouldn't really hurt the pirates) or do they actually provide the content themselves?

People have been putting those little files in for <i>years,</i> the only thing that's changed is that now the destination sites are bittorrent trackers with adverts and the txt files are poorly spelled and ugly, whereas back in the day they'd have awesome ASCII art advertising the various scene dumpsites the release had been FXP'd through.

I am shocked, shocked that piracy is not driven by music connoisseurs and film buffs eager to bring the artistic and cinematic masterworks of our times like Baby and Salt to poor wretches who can barely afford their $60 a month broadband and $500 computers to say nothing of their $0.99 music downloads.

<i>There are also cases where one username corresponds with a few IP addresses from the same ISP, which is known as the NAT [network address translation] effect.</i><p>Aren't they getting this backwards? NAT takes multiple computers (i.e., users) and concentrates them into a single outwardly-visible IP.

A couple of things struck me while reading this article:<p>1) Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs. That means the art of trading -- your time for a few ads, or whatever -- is happening. The <i>users</i> of Pirate Bay may be sticking it to the man or whatnot, but it's just another marketplace -- albeit one with much cheaper entry and transaction costs. (So it's a winner for the participants)<p>2) The confusion, yet again, between correlation and causation. Yes, there may only be 100 people who start all the torrents, <i>but the 100 people are not the cause of the torrents</i>, they're just the statistical artifact of having a marketplace in which certain behaviors are rewarded more than others. Take away those specific 100, and a new group would form. It's not like those 100 people are somehow directly causing the effect, they're just the people who fell into that role in that community at that time.

BitTorrent community is a hydra, and will grow two new heads if one is cut down.<p>If GrooveShark pays royalty fees, I indirectly pay for music, but movies in my country are nearly unavailable, and only the elite can afford to go to the cinema or buy disks.

discussion on slashdot<p><a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/16/1342236/How-Do-Seeders-Profit-From-BitTorrent" rel="nofollow">http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/16/1342236/How-Do-Seeder...</a>

Profit is a form of value. Big surprise that people are deriving value in different ways. Anyone that uses PirateBay without deriving some sort of value is either irrational or has blindly accepted the irrational premises of altruism.

Sounds like some good entrepreneurship going on there. These creative business models should be applauded. Some of them, if encouraged, may even lead to viable distribution business models for movies and music in the future.

Infinite greed, torpedo their link backs

Uhmmm...Do they really call that piece of crap "research"? Agrhrrrr

Having been part of the "XviD scene" for many years in the not too distant past, I have to say that the whole angle on this being profit-driven is just... wrong. NFO-files have been around since the early days of BBS trading in the Amiga scene and the PC scene alike, and the presence of web addresses in these files today doesn't change the reality that <i>people just don't care for reading the NFOs</i> when it comes to audio and video, and the vast majority don't even care when it comes to software unless they absolutely need to check the NFO for instructions on how to apply a crack, a registry key or similar. Furthermore, people don't give a damned about looking for web addresses in the NFOs to find out where to "get more"; they don't need to, they already know where to get their warez. To say that there is anything close to even moderate traffic going to the various groups' ad-laden addresses is a gross, gross exaggeration.