Colloquium Details
Faculty Research Colloquium - Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven?
| Author: | Reza Rejaie University of Oregon |
|---|---|
| Date: | November 17, 2011 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Abstract
BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for users who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial.
In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55K torrents in two major BitTorrent portals and examine their characteristics. We discover that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for uploading 67\% of the published content that serve 75\% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers can be divided to two groups. On the one hand, anti-piracy 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 portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic could significantly decrease. Finally, we demonstrate that loyal consumers are mostly associated with top publishers and the pattern of loyalty among consumers are related to the type and number of published content by these publishers.
This is a joint work with Ruben Cuevas, Michal Kryczka, Angel Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero (UC3M) and Sebastian Kaune (TU Darmstadt). For more details see our related CoNEXT 2010 paper at http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/11-Cuevas.pdf.
Biography
Reza Rejaie is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon. From October 1999 to March 2002, he was a Senior Technical Staff member at AT&T Labs-Research in Menlo Park, California. His research interests are network measurement, P2P networks, online social networks, multimedia networks. Reza received an NSF CAREER Award for his work on P2P streaming in 2005 and a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship in 2009. In the research community, Reza is on the editorial board of several journals. He has been the TPC chair for NOSSDAV'07, Global Internet '07, MMCN'08 and MMCN'09, and has also served on the program committee of numerous conferences and workshops, He has been a senior member of both the ACM and IEEE since September 2006. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in major conferences and journals.
Reza received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1996 and 1999, respectively. He completed his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1991.