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CacheLogic: “The True Picture of Peer-To-Peer Filesharing”

An interesting presentation from CacheLogic: The True Picture of Peer-To-Peer Filesharing.

They studied data moving through the Bit Torrent, eDonkey/eMule, FastTrack/KaZaA and Gnuttella networks, and made a number of measurements, observations and conclusions… including:

  • Dicplacement: RIAA action on Bit Torrent hosts has simply displaced traffic back onto the eDonkey network, rather than decreasing the overall volume of p2p
  • Significant use: not just a few “heavy users”
  • Asia/America: heavier use in these continents than Europe

The BBC News article also suggested that video was slightly on the decline on the Bit Torrent network, although I saw no evidence of that in the slides.

Further more, the analysis by CacheLogic used file extension to determine content-type — a lot of video content is now being distributed in archive format (.rar, .tz, etc) on Bit Torrent, which might suggest a slight flaw in the way they determine content.

Published in News