

How ~75% of PirateBay traffic is seeded by 100 people driven by profit  - m0hit
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/interviews/2011/02/16/torrent-seeders-driven-profit/

======
aw3c2
That is one awful article. Arbitrarily cut in 4 pieces and never getting to
the point. It is about a paper: [http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-
next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11...](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-
next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11-Cuevas.pdf) [pdf] which from a first glance is not
very good either.

Also the _traffic_ is not what this is about but users uploading things.

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.

~~~
double122
Articles like these make me wish HN had a TL;DR option. Something like:

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

"Seeders put links in their content requesting that you visit their Adsense
driven site" Click to read more...

Nice idea for my next hacking project maybe.

------
JoachimSchipper
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."

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?

~~~
mukyu
Most of the content on tpb comes from the scene which does not condone p2p
sharing. These people just have access to scene releases early and want to
profit from it.

[http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-slice-the-
top-o...](http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-slice-the-top-off-
movie-piracy-pyramid-100727/)

[http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-are-the-new-
kid...](http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-releasers-are-the-new-kids-on-the-
piracy-block-100729/)

Sadly, the report does not list any of the usernames of those that they
studied. However, if you just go to a category, pick a frequent submitter, and
look at their uploads most of the time there tags from many different groups.
Some even try to claim other's releases as their own.

~~~
JonnieCache
Yep. "The scene" really hates p2p in all its forms. They have been having
inter-group drama over it for years. Pretty hilarious all round.

See:

<http://www.scenenotice.org/details.php?id=1847>

<http://www.scenenotice.org/details.php?id=1920>

and many others on that site.

~~~
julian37
Don't these people have ANYTHING to do?

~~~
getsat
It seems to me that they are doing what they enjoy.

------
JonnieCache
People have been putting those little files in for _years,_ 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.

~~~
dalore
They still have those ASCII art and scene dumpsites. Problem is that someone
with access to scene material takes that, and then retags it with their shitty
website and uploads it to bittorrent.

~~~
Stormbringer
What a shame that their beautiful art which they invested time and energy into
is being misappropriated by someone else so that they cannot profit from their
creative endeavours.

~~~
steveklabnik
The difference is that the scene shrugs and says "oh well, everyone knows who
we are anyway" and doesn't try to bring the power of the state to bear.

------
patio11
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.

~~~
tomjen3
In the US sure, but how many can afford it in the third world?

~~~
Stormbringer
Get them reliable electricity, clean water, access to capital and stop
propping up their corrupt governments... and give them all computers. And
_then_ we can talk about whether their music downloads are priced fairly.

------
CWuestefeld
_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._

Aren't they getting this backwards? NAT takes multiple computers (i.e., users)
and concentrates them into a single outwardly-visible IP.

~~~
chopsueyar
should be "...which is known as a dynamic IP address."

Actually, it is a bad sentence, 'which is known as' is referring to 'cases'.

------
DanielBMarkham
A couple of things struck me while reading this article:

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 _users_ 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)

2) The confusion, yet again, between correlation and causation. Yes, there may
only be 100 people who start all the torrents, _but the 100 people are not the
cause of the torrents_ , 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.

~~~
mahmud
_Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose,
trading occurs._

The truth of that assertion hinges on us _not_ remembering the billion other
counter-examples.

It might comfort free-market capitalists like ourselves to paint humanity with
that thick brush, but truth tells differently: people don't always gather with
the intention to buy/sell, in fact, sometimes, commercial intent is
detrimental to a healthy assembly and is frowned upon.

~~~
wladimir
Just that trading occurs anywhere people get together doesn't mean everything
is a market. I'd have liked to +10 you. It's so hip these days to see
everything in the context of economics, as a market. In my opinion that's
actually hurting our understanding of human behaviour, by trivializing every
interaction.

~~~
cynicalkane
It's a generalization, not a trivialization. Saying all human interactions are
markets is like saying everything in computer programming is an object (or
everything is a function, or everything is data, or whatever). It's a
particular way of looking things that yields insights depending on where, how,
and how well it is applied.

------
pestaa
BitTorrent community is a hydra, and will grow two new heads if one is cut
down.

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.

------
galuggus
discussion on slashdot

[http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/16/1342236/How-Do-
Seeder...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/16/1342236/How-Do-Seeders-
Profit-From-BitTorrent)

~~~
julian37
... which is a dupe of this one:

[http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/26/1611226/100-P2P-Users-
Upl...](http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/26/1611226/100-P2P-Users-Upload-75-of-
Content)

------
jonallanharper
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.

------
swombat
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.

~~~
notahacker
I'm far from a fan of the big movie studios and their rigid distribution
models, but I'm still unconvinced that annotating other people's content with
spam portals is either (i) a particularly creative business model or (ii) a
viable alternative revenue source for those creating and selling the content.

~~~
swombat
You have to make do with what you can. At the moment, any more legitimate form
of content monetisation is effectively ruled out by the "rigid", as you call
it, stance of the copyright holders. I'm sure the people setting up those
sites would rather use more profitable business models.

In fact, if you read the article, you will see a screenshot of one
enterprising bit-torrent site offering monthly subscriptions. So even with all
the hurdles thrown into their way by the current owners of the time-unlimited
copyrights on these works, they still manage to do more than just spam
portals.

I think that's to be applauded.

------
vipivip
Infinite greed, torpedo their link backs

------
x4m
Uhmmm...Do they really call that piece of crap "research"? Agrhrrrr

~~~
goosmurf
I can't agree more. The site is also incredibly irritating. Why split an
otherwise average length article over 4 short pages and stuff each with
pointless images? We really shouldn't be linking to such crappy sites.

------
hackermom
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 _people just don't care
for reading the NFOs_ 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.

~~~
mattmanser
The trouble with a declaration like this is that it has no basis in fact, just
your own personal experience.

I have never seen _anybody_ click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning
that means that obviously no-one clicks them.

And yet google makes billions off it. Apparently 10% of internet users make up
almost all the advert clicks.

I would agree that it's even more of a small % for nfo files and txt files in
torrents because of the effort of getting to them. It could still easily
translate to serious money when you're talking about 75% of the entire torrent
ecosystem using only 100 peoples' torrents.

I have no facts, but the odd behaviour presented in this article makes me
suspect you're actually way off mark as I find it hard to imagine that there
is some small group of altruistic French seeders using one ISP who wish to
bring the joy of movies and music to everyone for such a massive amount of
effort.

The more likely explanation, just as presented in the article, is that there's
good money to be made as long as you take the operation to scale.

~~~
Goronmon
_I have never seen anybody click on an ad on a webpage. By your reasoning that
means that obviously no-one clicks them.

And yet google makes billions off it. Apparently 10% of internet users make up
almost all the advert clicks._

I disagree that NFO files are anything like web ads. Web ads are in your face
and surround content you are trying to access at all times. They are more like
spam e-mails that show up in your Spam e-mail folder. You have to open that
folder to see them, and then decide if you want to click through any links
contained inside.

Plus, the demographic that is a much more specific demographic than users of
the internet as a whole.

