Communications of the ACM
A Peek Inside the Internet's Favorite File-Sharing Network
The BitTorrent peer-to-peer networks has gained notoriety for allowing users to illegally download copyright protected music and movies.
Credit: iStockPhoto.com
A new study is among the first to take a deep look at the behavior of users of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Rovira i Virgili University's Jordi Duch and colleagues collaborated with computer scientists at Northwestern University, the makers of BitTorrent plug-in Ono, which accelerates BitTorrent download speeds in exchange for allowing researchers to monitor users' download behaviors. The plug-in anonymizes users' data and does not track the content of their downloads. However, Duch and his team were able to track what sorts of media users were downloading by noting that certain file sizes tended to correlate with specific media.
The researchers examined about 10,000 BitTorrent users for four years and drew several conclusions. For example, users tended to be very consistent in the types of media they shared and often downloaded on a weekly basis. They also found that users in a given country had similar download behaviors, with users in nations with more developed Internet service offerings favoring music downloads while those in less developed nations favored movies and TV shows. Duch says this is likely because the presence of services such as Netflix have given users in developed countries an inexpensive and legal means of accessing such content.
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