Behavioural Analysis of Publishers in Distribution of Pirated Content

Abstract

Digital piracy is a massive phenomenon on the Internet today. Various illegal file sharing and streaming platforms are offering free access to a large amount of unauthorised media and software content. Some research has been done to understand these file sharing and streaming ecosystems and implement measures to lower the impact of piracy. However, little is known about affects of behaviour of content publishers and consumers of these ecosystems. In this research, we analyse the behaviour of content publishers of File Hosting Service (FHS) ecosystem. We measure publisher activity in the FHS ecosystem by a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of the huge amount of data that has been collected for half a decade from four source sites that share copyrighted material. With over 2.9 million posts shared by more than 77 thousand publishers with 537 million views and over 5 million comments by content consumers, we claim that this dataset is arguably the largest dataset collected to analyse the behaviour of publishers. We find that the FHS ecosystem is very dynamic. FHS keep on changing, some become defunct while others are replaced. We also find that anti-piracy movements which constitute of banning or taking down the illegal file-sharing websites and source sites have very short term impact on piracy. Interestingly, content popularity is not the major motivation for publishers to continue to illegally share copyrighted content. Other motives include incentives (monetary or non-monetary) that are offered by source sites or the file-hosting sites that reward the author whenever a content consumer downloads the shared file. We discover that the publishers in the FHS also keep on changing as they migrate to other FHS looking for benefits and rewards. Our research can be used by policymakers while making policies and legislation in digital piracy, and also by regular users and researchers to have a better understanding of illegal file sharing services.