The Interplay between Seeders and Pirates in P2P Networks: An Empirical Analysis

We study the propagation of digital piracy in P2P networks with two population segments: seeders, who are original suppliers of files and pirates, who copy the files. Early on, seeders are the primary supply source for pirates, while later on, pirates can also function as suppliers of the file. The mixture of these two segments enables or impedes the piracy propagation rate over time. In this paper, we empirically identify the distribution of the two segments and estimate their asymmetric impacts on piracy propagation. Based on an influence-mixture model, we find that this mixture of seeders and pirates can exhibit diverse dips and modes in the piracy propagation curve. Our main finding shows that seeders and pirates exhibit a close interaction process in the period before the release of an album, however, after the official album release, seeders affect pirates’ downloading behavior very little. In the pre-release period, the influence of seeders on pirates are estimated to be as high as 53.66%, this influence reduces to as low as 0.89% during post-release period. The prediction error of our influence mixture model was as low as 0.16 based on MAD (Mean Absolute Deviation) and 0.11% based on MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error).