BitTorrent Seeders: Driven By Profit?

Who are these seeders?

BitTorrent may enable copyrighted content (and occasionally legitimate files too) to spread like wildfire, but if the findings in this research are correct, then the actual origin of the content comes from a very select few people. The music, movie and games industry must be salivating at the thought of getting the identities of these users in their hands, so who are they exactly?

Of course, the research only monitored the activity on BitTorrent after the traffic had been through the ISP, so their knowledge is limited, but the largest proportion (by a massive margin) came via French ISP OVH.


'This provider is supposed to be torrent-friendly,' says Kryczka, 'and we know from their IP addresses that this is like some dedicated machine. OVH may know who the people are, but we can only trace it after the ISP. I don't know what the policy of OVH is, whether they know the surnames of their users. I guess it's possible to trace those people through OVH and take legal action, but that would probably not finish the piracy problem.'

This is a big question, though – if these 100-odd users got bored with BitTorrent, or were even prosecuted, would it stop piracy or would other users merely step into the seeding role? 'This is exactly the question we asked in our paper,' says Kryczka, 'because you can see that these few people are not just responsible for 66 per cent of content, but also 75 per cent of downloads, across the Pirate Bay, so this is a huge amount.'


It's difficult to say what impact the loss of these initial seeders would have on BitTorrent, but what is clear is that the root of BitTorrent seeding is as much about business as the movie and music industries. If you do pirate copyrighted content via BitTorrent, and applaud yourself for fighting the profiteering greed of copyright holders, then it's also worth remembering that many of the original seeders on BitTorrent are also making a profit from their wares, and they didn't even have any creative involvement in the content you're enjoying either.

For more information on the research, we recommend having a read through the research paper.